New section and/or challenge

Ha!

Is that some sort of paradox?? ... I'm a little worried now!

This suggestion reminds me of the old DrawingBoard forum (which seems to have gone the way of those other forums.) There was a monthly Drawing Jam section where the mod/admin posted a reference image (usually a sexy girl with or without clothes) and everyone had a go at drawing it in whatever style they liked, sketch, caricature, line drawing, full portrait ... whatever. There was no competition or voting or deadline, just a place where people joined in from the same reference starting point.
Even though I wasn't a member there I always liked to see what was happening there and sometimes played along in a lurky, nonposting kind of way. And I've always preferred the kind of challenges where reference is already provided (like e-caricatures and Wittygraphy) as it allows amateur scribblers like yours truly to focus on just learning technique rather than pretending to be a professional working to a brief (not that that isn't valuable too.)

That's a pretty good idea.

Although, we may be able to broaden the references a bit if the moderators are willing to take this on board. For example, having male models would be interesting, as would overweight folk and that sort of thing. Non conventional models and subjects would be cool.

At least it would be a new category that would facilitate the posting of non sci-fi and/or fantasy figurative art and portraiture.

I wasn't suggesting it should be sexy girl references, merely obseving that on the other site that's exactly what it ended up being every month.

As for the time issue, that was always irrelevant. They weren't competetive or collaborative, they were just there for people to dip into whenever they wanted.
The point was that it was a narrow challenge that existed independently of deadline. Instead of the professional brief where you have to come up with ideas, create thumbnails, work out a composition, do research, paint the 1st draft, get feedback etc. it was just a case of; "There's the reference, see what you can do in your own time." And because everyone was working around the same theme you could see people taking on (and solving) the same problems that you were having.

Sorry, I've been busy this week and haven't had a chance to come back to this topic.

I do intend to write something much longer, and I'll come back to that later on today - I'm on my coffee break at the moment, so I don't have much time - but I wanted to address the rough idea of the figurative challenges.

Valence brought up the Drawing Board Jams, and that's a good analogy as they are one of the things that sparked the idea in my head.

Basically, how they worked was that on a monthly basis one of the Mods posted up three images of a subject - generally full figure, and varied between nude models, clothed models and celebrities - and then members were free to interpret that as they wished, as long it used one of the poses as the basis. Anything from sketches to full rendered pieces; realistic to cartoony and exaggerated; members could draw all three if they wished, or just one.

Although the timescale was nominally monthly (by the virtue of having a new subject each month), there was no actual finish date, and no competitive element, so they could be added to by anyone at any time. I guess that's part of the reason I thought of a specific section for this - over time, it could build up a "library" of subjects, that could be dipped into at leisure, rather than be restricted to a specified period after which it's "closed" (as the IFX challenges were).

As Valence mentioned, the Drawing Board Jams were primarily female in subject, but I see it as being broader in scope, possibly even including animals as subjects.

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As some samples of images that were produced in the Drawing Board jams, have a look at Adam Byrne's site - www.burncomics.com/gallery/ . He was the main Mod for that section of the DB, and a lot of the figure pieces were produced for that.

em... wrote:

I guess that's part of the reason I thought of a specific section for this - over time, it could build up a "library" of subjects, that could be dipped into at leisure, rather than be restricted to a specified period after which it's "closed" (as the IFX challenges were).

As Valence mentioned, the Drawing Board Jams were primarily female in subject, but I see it as being broader in scope, possibly even including animals as subjects.

Exactly. Having a library of subjects would be great and very helpful. Plus, following the link that Em... put in was really interesting. I would hope that that sort of thing could happen in this community too. It looked great!