Life Drawing - Second Session



We drew two sketches per A1 page in this session. This is my first page; the figure on the left was my first go. As you can see the body started going wonky and I was trying to draw in all the detail straight away. We got 20 mins to draw this one and afterwards Mik sat us all down and gave us a demonstration on how he starts drawing a figure. He said that he begins to draw with straight lines and look for the shapes and not to look at the detail until you've got the main frame of the body. He talked about making a map out of the body and looking for reference points and looking for negative space.He also said that it was important not to focus too much on the same point and move around on the drawing. This was really helpful; I found it much easier to find the figure in the second drawing.

Mik taught us to look at angles and how to use our pencils to to see if them getting it right. I found this very useful to know as I used it a lot to check I was getting the correct angles; it made a real difference to my figures. Mik said that what I was doing was good but he wanted me to be more sketchy to begin with and try to sketch the whole figure in the time we were given. I was feeling like I was being too slow and careful; I need to speed up a bit and try to get the whole figure. I definitely feel like I have improved from last week though. 

For the first time we had to draw a model who was sat down. This was a bit alarming but actually a really good challenge; it was nice and refreshing to draw a different position. We had slightly longer to draw these two images - 30 mins - which meant I managed to get the whole figure in - even the feet!! I started using hatching to shade in the figure on the left. I found the second figure harder to draw because it was a more difficult angle, in my opinion.

Mik thought we were able to cope with a harder position and he gave us an hour (give or take) to draw. I've quite happy with the shape and I started shading using the hatching technique like Mik showed us. The only thing I found difficult was towards the end when I wanted to put more detail in. I was so used to looking at the shape and using straight lines so it was weird going back to detail again!

Next week hopefully work faster and work on the finer details such as toes, face and fingers!