This year my New Years Resolution is to intensely study figure drawing. I'm taking a class, I'm going to life drawing marathons. I'm drawing mostly in charcoal for basic training.

In a typical life drawing session, there will be a live model who poses for various lengths of time. Starting with two minute poses, there's only enough time to "get the gesture," to figure out where the major parts of the body are, and how big. Then the five minute poses, in which light and dark come out, and some notion of shape, if you're lucky. With the ten and tweny minute poses, drawing gets a little more comfortable, but don't get lazy, start with the gesture, then block in the lights and darks, then finally go for detail.

In this show I've got several sections, organized by the medium that the drawings are in:

DIGITAL

All the drawings in the Digital pages are drawn entirely on the computer, from live models. I didn't do any drawings fromphotographs or other sketches. What I did was to bring a powerbook with a drawing tablet to my life drawing sessions.

The first time I did this there were a lot of eyebrows raised, and then people started crowding around me wanting to see what I was doing. I remember one woman asking me "how is *that* (the computer) any better than this (her easel with a beautiful pastel drawing on it)."

Of course there's no answer to questions like this. No medium is better than others. Some are just infinitely more frustrating :-)

CHARCOAL

What I intend to do here is to digitize some of my charcoal figure drawings, but since I haven't gotten around to it yet, I'll throw in some very early self protraits which just happen to be in charcoal.

ACRYLIC

Later in the year I started bringing my easel to the sessions and doing drawings (paintings, now) in acrylic on paper. I usually showed up for the sessions late, so was only doing 20 and 30 minute poses. Still, this is fast for painting.

(Sorry, I haven't digitized these ones yet either. They're coming. Really.)