Dan Moran

For years I've gone to life drawing groups to practice working from a live model. It's good practice, but these groups only go for 2 hours, minus model breaks, so I pretty much never get to finish a piece. Remember that most of the time I'm working with a ball-point pen, and it takes a long time to cover an 11" x 14" piece of paper or vellum with just a Bic pen. The charcoal pieces shown here were also done in life drawing sessions, and in these cases I was able to finish because charcoal can cover a page a lot more quickly than pen. The trade-off is that I lose the ability to do fine detail work, for which a pen is my best instrument.