This week was really different to our other sessions of life drawing - it was away with line and in with tone! The idea of this week was to look at light and shadow on the body and less about the exact shape of the form (although proportion and shapes were still important; they just took a secondary role to tone). We were using charcoal which I was a bit nervous about because last time we used it in life drawing (first session) I found it quite difficult to use. When we first arrived at the lesson, John (our teacher) got us to start of in our sketchbooks and told us we had 5 minutes to try and capture the light and shadow. We weren't really sure what to do so we started off how we'd always done before and looked at the shape and proportions. My first sketch was terrible! Then John explained more about what we wanted from us; giving us a demonstration of how to go about using the charcoal and I realised we didn't have to be confined to lines and so I just went for it; using the charcoal to make shapes using shade. This produced a much better result and it was then that I began to get excited about this session. I knew I'd really like it if this was how we were going to be drawing. From that moment on I always held my charcoal on its side, decided in my head whereabouts on the page my figure was going to go and roughly put in where I thought the shadows were; creating the shapes of arms, breasts, legs etc. This felt so freeing and I really enjoyed it; I love using charcoal because of its loose, expressive quality and I really felt like I was using it how it should be used. We did four quick sketches on a page and I was quite pleased with them although I found it hard to try and express the idea of hands because you can't really make detail using just shading when working that small.
After break, we swapped models and we worked on a larger scale with a longer time scale. The principle was the same but it was just to get us used to working bigger. What I liked about this way of working is that because you can't use line to express anything, you have to really look at where the light and dark is on the figure in order to make sense of the form. I'm particularly proud of the figure with his back to us out of these two because I really feel like I captured the shadow and therefore the form well. I think on the one where the model is facing the audience I should have gone darker with the shadow. I also think I didn't get the proportions quite right on this drawing; the legs look a little too short and thick.
For our final piece of the day, we had to do the opposite of what we'd been doing so far. Instead of looking for the shadow on a light background, we had to look for the light on a dark background. We had to smudge charcoal across the page to create a medium tone background and use either a putty or plastic rubber (I used both because they both give slightly different effects) to pick out where the light hit the body and then after use the charcoal again to add in the darker tones. I found this a lot harder and quite frustrating because it felt very back to front to me. But I'm actually quite pleased with the end result and think it was a good learning curve to do it this way. There's definitely a nice quality to the drawing; it really looks as if light is hitting the figure.
I loved this session of life drawing; it was really fun just to try a different way of looking at a figure. Although these drawings are a lot less technically accurate, I feel that they are much more expressive and interesting to look at.
This week was really different to our other sessions of life drawing - it was away with line and in with tone! The idea of this week was to look at light and shadow on the body and less about the exact shape of the form (although proportion and shapes were still important; they just took a secondary role to tone). We were using charcoal which I was a bit nervous about because last time we used it in life drawing (first session) I found it quite difficult to use. When we first arrived at the lesson, John (our teacher) got us to start of in our sketchbooks and told us we had 5 minutes to try and capture the light and shadow. We weren't really sure what to do so we started off how we'd always done before and looked at the shape and proportions. My first sketch was terrible! Then John explained more about what we wanted from us; giving us a demonstration of how to go about using the charcoal and I realised we didn't have to be confined to lines and so I just went for it; using the charcoal to make shapes using shade. This produced a much better result and it was then that I began to get excited about this session. I knew I'd really like it if this was how we were going to be drawing. From that moment on I always held my charcoal on its side, decided in my head whereabouts on the page my figure was going to go and roughly put in where I thought the shadows were; creating the shapes of arms, breasts, legs etc. This felt so freeing and I really enjoyed it; I love using charcoal because of its loose, expressive quality and I really felt like I was using it how it should be used. We did four quick sketches on a page and I was quite pleased with them although I found it hard to try and express the idea of hands because you can't really make detail using just shading when working that small.
After break, we swapped models and we worked on a larger scale with a longer time scale. The principle was the same but it was just to get us used to working bigger. What I liked about this way of working is that because you can't use line to express anything, you have to really look at where the light and dark is on the figure in order to make sense of the form. I'm particularly proud of the figure with his back to us out of these two because I really feel like I captured the shadow and therefore the form well. I think on the one where the model is facing the audience I should have gone darker with the shadow. I also think I didn't get the proportions quite right on this drawing; the legs look a little too short and thick. 
For our final piece of the day, we had to do the opposite of what we'd been doing so far. Instead of looking for the shadow on a light background, we had to look for the light on a dark background. We had to smudge charcoal across the page to create a medium tone background and use either a putty or plastic rubber (I used both because they both give slightly different effects) to pick out where the light hit the body and then after use the charcoal again to add in the darker tones. I found this a lot harder and quite frustrating because it felt very back to front to me. But I'm actually quite pleased with the end result and think it was a good learning curve to do it this way. There's definitely a nice quality to the drawing; it really looks as if light is hitting the figure. 
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