She Sure is {Life Drawing} Blushing Nudes

Hibiscus tea ink and graphite:

She Sure is {Life Drawing} in Charcoal

I may have mentioned before that Pratt's Draw-A-Thon is steeped in Tradition. In that tradition, I have two iron clad rules, and one is 'Friends don't let friends use charcoal'. I've spent the last decade softly smiling at the freshmen who are required to attend this blessed occasion. They are fuzzy. Like in a camera obscura kind of way... You can see them, but you can't really see them. They are covered in a thin layer of black dust. They look ridiculous. They look like this:

The crazed look in their eyes kicks in at about 4am. This year however, I was without Sandra, and so I was wooed by the racoon-rimmed eyes of a small sophomore sprite who had doused herself in ebony powder and was attacking her sketchbook with earnest. Knowing full well that charcoal sketches always look just plain awful and there's no way to glean anything actually happening with them, I was sure her work was going to be horrid, but her sketchbook was beautiful, so I had to ask her where she got it. She'd picked it up in Florence on a study abroad program. I braced myself for her dirty, dark sketches and was instead floored and impressed by how beautiful they were.

"Here, wanna try some?" she reached out her hand to share a broken stick and I was pulled back to a particularly lovely day on the bleachers in high-school. --OK.... Just a little... I thought. So here are my charcoal sketches from a long night, in which I made new friends, with kids and with medium.

 

She Sure is {Delirious} Pratt Draw-A-Thon

This June, Mika and I will mark six years at job-job. At high noon on Friday, I had her make my annual pilgrimage to Utrecht on 23rd and 8th so I could fulfill my pre-all-night-drawing ritual, which includes, um... going to Utrecht to buy things I'm going to burn through over the span of 12 hours. In pure brilliant Mika style, after crooning through sketchbooks and drooling over new pens she deadpan delivered this, "I can really mark the year by your weird traditions." This year we know it has been a year. It's Spring. I have life drawing to share.

Also, in pure traditional style, I walked home from Pratt at 8am, absolutely high, my body pumping with pure adrenaline. It's a marathon for a reason, and while I've never run more than a 5K (in which I felt my lungs may explode ;)) I can understand how absolutely crazed with energy you can be after pushing yourself as hard as you can go. After 12 hours of drawing straight through from dusk to dawn, you feel like you're bionic. 

So just like last year, and every year for the last decade, I power walked home. In true traditional Mark-Your-Calendars style I listened to Elliot Smith, Eminem, Eartha Kitt, and Ben Folds, (Maybe there was a little bit of unauthorized Gotye thrown in there).Pratt fuels me, and when I am nostalgic and ecstatic and feel like the world can barely hold my energy, I listen to the music that mattered to me when I lived on Dekalb and when it was an odd day that didn't find paint in my hair. 

I got home. I sang in a cold shower (like every year). I dressed in jeans and a fresh t-shirt (like every year). I dance-ran to my studio (like every year). I got about half an hour of prolific work done, barreling through without even a hint of tired, and then... I zombie walked to my bed, half crazed with an all systems shutting down urgency unlike anything I know 364 days a year. I threw myself across the mattress, where I stayed until 2pm (just like every year). 

This week you'll be getting quick draw reports from that midnight oil reserve that lights my fire all year long, and if you can't wait, there's always last year.

Naked Bliss

Fin.

The last of the drawings I did last week at the Draw A Thon are up and at em' and on FlickR.

I am really happy that I managed to document all the drawings that I liked from this year's showing. Sometimes I don't actually finish scanning them because they're just overwhelming. I'm glad I get to blog about this kind of stuff that normally wouldn't see the light of day. It keeps me motivated and on track.

My blog really helps me in so many ways. How does your blog help you?

I Draw Girls

On one particularly long day in college a life-drawing professor chided me. Somehow (how?) he sensed my feigned interest in drawing the male form. Perhaps I was nibbling on the end of a charcoal pencil while a nude man graced the stage. When i draw men it's with half my heart.



"Amber, you can't base an entire career on just drawing girls...." he sing-songed.
I paused in thought, then recommitted myself to my Bristol, realizing with a sigh that he was probably right.



What have seven years of reflection on this point taught us? Oh, I know.

BOO YA.



I say neigh, Professor. Neigh to that.

My life drawing from this year's Pratt Draw-A-Thon can be seen on FlickR. I'll be uploading the last of the drawings that happened this year this coming weekend.

Naked. Nude. Bare.

It's been a tough week.

I am tired in a "not just sleepy" way. I know here at She Sure is Sketchy you're used to seeing a happy artist. But sometimes I have hard days and sometimes those stretch into hard weeks. It has been a very hard week.

It has been so hard in fact, that I actually considered not attending the 22nd Annual Pratt Draw-A-Thon. I've never missed it, not once, in the last decade.

Sandra, my constant motivator, promised to come and draw with me until midnight, even though she had a crazy - early morning class at F.I.T. on Saturday. Her support was vital to arrival at Pratt. Amidst this "Should I Stay Or Should I Go" conversation I realized that my loyalty would get me in the end. I just couldn't turn my back on tradition. Pratt has had me at every Draw-A-Thon since I first arrived in New York. I felt that we owed it to one another.

I grabbed some odds and ends, graphite pencils, the new sketchbook I bought at Brooklyn Museum last week, a butcher paper sketchbook I've been wanting to try, some Tombow Markers, a little pot of watercolor paints and a waterbrush and made it out the door, feet pointed towards Clinton Hill.

In one of my favorite, dance/challenge/coming of age/New York movies, a wayward ballerina struggling with her life and decisions that she doesn't remember making but that face her none-the-less is told to take all that angst "to the bar".

Last night I realized that my personal bar is life drawing. It fixes everything wrong in me, and it balances me, creating a perfect zen of work that is at once constricting and freeing. It is hard and it is worth doing.

Twelve hours of straight drawing a moving figure leaves you raw and stripped. It also knocks down your barriers and breaks through your walls.

I am thankful I went, glad I had the strength to stay until dawn (with every passing year the stamina it takes is more fleeting) and happy with what I have to show after 12 late night hours at my Alma Mater. Most of all I am thankful that I have something that is mine, and something that always makes sense, even when other things might seem a hazy shade of winter.

I've uploaded some of my butcher paper favorites to my FlickR account.

I'll show off the monotone watercolors I did over the course of the evening in the next day or so.

If you haven't had the chance to draw the figure in a while, I suggest writing and filling yourself a prescription. It just might be the thing you've been missing.