My technique of working is I go around with my iPhone and with my sketchbook. I take thousands and thousands and thousands of iPhone photos. I also draw from life. I can draw really, really, really fast. It's a way that I build a rapport with people.
When you draw a nude, sketch the whole figure and nicely fit the members to it and to each other. Even though you may only finish one portion of the drawing, just make certain that all the parts hang together, so that the study will be useful to you in the future.
I read somewhere that Rubens said students should not draw from life, but draw from all the great classic casts. Then you really get the measure of them, you really know what to do. And then, put in your own dimples. Isn't that marvelous!
Painting from life is a completely different monster, which I like. But because I've been painting from photography for so long, I've learned my best moves from photography.
I went to art school, and every Tuesday and Friday we drew the nude. If you look at Western painting, male and female nudes are in the center of every painting. It's difficult and exciting to draw the nude. Why get so upset about this? It's our duty to break taboos.
If your work is going to draw from life, you'd better work very hard to keep up with reality.
The best thing is to draw men and women from the nude and thus fix in the memory by constant exercise the muscles of the torso, back, legs, arms and knees, with bones underneath.
Working from live models is too much trouble; it takes too much time.
The whole point of art school is that you're going to be able to have nudes all day long and a teacher who is there to move you. It's great. I did a tiny bit in the one school in Paris, and it was wonderful because you'd have a nude taking a crazy position, and you'd have 10 seconds to do a drawing. Then you'd do a one-minute drawing.
I felt the need to get back to painting and I thought the best way was to start drawing, so I enrolled in a life drawing class. I soon discovered that people made very interesting subjects and I am still surprised that I had never discovered it before.
I certainly always do draw upon stuff in my life. You do that instinctively as an actor.
Students work in schools making life studies for years, win prizes for life studies and find in the end that they know practically nothing of the human figure. They have acquired the ability to copy.
In school, I never really grasped drawing the nude form.
Of course, in the art class, I was the model.
The whole point of art school is that you're going to be able to have nudes all day long and a teacher who is there to move you. It's great.
I like to paint nudes mostly.
I've done figure drawing classes or whatever.
