How Long are your poses usually?

[SpeeDFX]

I admit I am usually a REALLY slow drawer, but since the beginning of this year I've had a HUGE improvement in my drawing speed/accuracy ratio. I have this figure drawing class where the target is to gain speed in our drawing. I almost never have worked in color and as a result I can now do portraits (24x30) in full color in less than 25 minutes. 25 minutes is the longest amount of time our teacher gives us to work on some drawings (maybe one to zro a class, all the others are 1 to 10 minutes most of the time). Last year we had a different figure drawing teacher that retired that had a totally different teaching method. We usually had 30-1hour long poses but I didn't seen nearly as much progress as I have this year. My teacher this year's theory is "Speed first, accuracy second".

What do you guys think of this? Have you had similar experiences like this? etc...

[rimwalker]

Hmmm... interesting.
My figure drawing instructor would break it down and make us do progressively longer drawing through out the class session. We'd start off with speed sketches and work up to lengthy drawings. 5min, 10min, 20min, 40min, etc. His theory was that we'd "warm-up". It allowed us to learn to capture the most interesting and important details first and to do so quickly. That way when we had more time we could really work on pushing the detail further.

[egerie]

I totally agree with your teacher rimwalker. Short poses are a good exercise to force you into breaking down the body to it's simplest shape and dynamic before falling into the usual trap of jumping too early into details.
Warm ups are great too. I like to do 2 minutes poses at the beginning of a session.
SpeeDFX: the quote from your current teacher is good but I beleive what he's doing will result in both those caracteristics being fine tuned after a while. If you hurry up, you concentrate on movement and accuracy.. Wouldn't you agree ? :)

[clayrodery v.03]

At my figure drawing place (its not really a class, just show up and draw naked people), we'll start off with 3 30 second warm-up poses, the onto a minute, 2 minute, 5, 7, 10, and all the way to 25 max. I've been going since september, and since then I've learned to put down a lot of visual information really fast. This one was done in about 8 to 10 minutes:
http://images.customize.org/category/aim/fig21-0_full.gif

[Jason Manley]

it is possible to put down a lot of information fast but the problem with ignoring long term poses...at least six hours to start...is that you dont learn to be as accurate with your eye as you would if you drew long term.


that kind of drawing is great...what you are doing is learning to get really great at starting your drawings...or paintings as drawing is the prelim to painting.

gettting started is just a small part...tis finishing that is the most difficult.

cant learn to finish unless you finish right


j

[egerie]

Right. How long usually is a long term pose ? I can't think of posing for 6 hours even with breaks.. Hello crampworld !