I attended a new figure drawing workshop this morning, hosted by Bare Life Art, with two models, Ahmad and Joe. After a couple of five-minute warmup poses, the guys posed together. The poses were intricate, intertwined, extremely tender. It was a great joy drawing them. I incorporated color to help clarify whose legs belonged to whom in the joined poses.

These all came out pretty good, so I will just present them in chronological order. Here are the warmup poses:

I loved how coy the model on the left was, with his hand on his face and his cross-body twist away from the viewer. The model on the left got some of that cross-body twisting in as well. These guys are extremely talented models. 

The ten-minute pose:

I have seen other artists incorporate color in this way in the past, but this was my first time trying it, and I am VERY pleased with the results. Full disclosure, in all of these sketches except the forty-minute pose, I added the color outlining after the session ended, so while the underlying pencil sketch here took me only ten minutes, I spent another few minutes later adding color; and that disclaimer applies, as I said, to all but the forty-minute pose.

Here is the 15 minute pose:

This pose was so tender and romantic I wanted to draw them forever. I see that I forgot to color some of Ahmad blue. I'll add that later.

The twenty-minute pose:

I'm finding that the less time I spend trying to make the faces look good, the better the faces look. I have been told over and over that less is more, etc, and I am starting to understand what that means.

And finally, the forty-minute pose. Forty minutes is so much time, it felt very luxurious.

See what I mean about the faces? I spent barely any time drawing eyes or mouths, really I just sketched in their bears and some guide lines where there eyes would be, and very rudimentary noses. Compare to the faces in the 20 minute sketch, where the noses look sort of weird. I spent more time on the faces in the 20-minute sketch than in the 40. Go figure.