I am starting to go through old sketches and other art done long ago by my father who is no longer of this realm.
He did a lot of figure sketching. This shall be the first I upload here and other places online. This one was done with pencil on Clearprint vellum with Ebony pencils. That was his drawing mediums of choice usually. He’d loosely sketch and smear it all around with turpentine and a rag. It made for a rich look. It was fast and Clearprint vellum could take a bunch of rubbing without wearing through or buckling quick.
I actually learned to draw like that as a small kid with those same materials.
In this age it kinda sucks because Clearprint is expensive, and Ebony pencils were bought out and changed to become a lesser product.
Anyways…
I made this available on my LaidigArts.Com website as a canvas print for those who may be interested.
I’ll eventually upload other types of his art as well. I’m going to stick to these types of things for a while however because figure drawing has a unique place in my brain.
As a small child I was brought along to figure sketching groups and also to figure classes he taught at certain points.
I was the only kid in the room with a variety of adults who had various levels of skill in drawing and one or two nude models posing for us.
I usually worked on an easel, but sometimes not. Charcoal was my fave for these sessions because it wasn’t a type of messy that could get me in trouble and blended well. I also liked sepia pencils.
The regular groups had no problem with a kid being there, but in the classes my dad ran through different programs and through the college a few times I occasionally seemed to be problematic to certain types of wanna-be artists. They seemed distressed over a kid seeing a naked human, as if that was not natural.
I didn’t like those types of people. I also noted that none of them ever could draw worth a crud. I formed the opinion that people who wish to dictate their own morals on others simply couldn’t art well.
I’m now in my fifties and still hold that opinion.
My father though, he was pretty dang liberal in those years. Liberal as in the true sense of the word, not the modern politics version. Basically he had a do your own thing, live and let live, be cool attitude.
So… as long as I behaved and was actually interested I was included in his artistic endeavors pretty often.
The minute I started drifting to other things though, let’s just say he had no patience for that.
If I was drawing and being cool at figure workshops and such all was well.
If I decided to run off down the hall and zoom hotweels and matchbox cars around I was in trouble.
I’ll admit both happened.
No matter how you slice it though, in the end I recall those figure classes and groups fondly. They also gave me a huge foundation and head start when it came to drawing humans.
A very strange bonus is in tattooing. As a tattooist when my original career took off in the early 90s I quickly realized that almost no other tattooers understood the body and how it visually flowed. The few I did meet (and usually became friends with) also seemed to all have not just some fine art backgrounds, but had been exposed to it all as children. Figure painters, sculptors, dancers, etc. As kids they’d worked with bodies and composition. They understood it at a different level because of this. These people, like myself, preferred tattoos to flow and move on a person.
We were however also service workers. That is what a tattooist is when you get down to it. We provide a service.
The average person doesn’t want flow. They don’t want to be art. They just want an image on them. That is cool too, but the other way… ah, to be art, to make art. It is a different level.
So, in closing, you can get a print of Loose figure sketch # 1, early 1980s by Virgil Laidig HERE via LaidigArts.Com and also I will be uploading a version of it to my Pixels page eventually if you’d like other options.