Life Drawing - (Week 1)

In our life drawing class, we were given A2 sheets of paper to draw on, practicing with the charcoals and graphite to create as many different marks, lines and shades as we could. This was my sheet of paper after I had fun drawing all over it:

Then we swapped our paper with another student in the class, and were tasked to see shapes and interesting things inside their marks. The sheet I received had lots of circles and wavy lines, so I decided to turn mine into an intriguing character with oddly shaped eyes, wiggly eyebrows and wonky glasses resting on his head, a large bulbous nose protruding above an old cigar. The marks that my fellow student made created a really cool base for the skin, with all the different kinds of marks showing through and creating a really interesting texture.

Next, we started the life drawing using a male model, and drawing on A2 print paper using charcoal again. We had a minute per pose, so it meant that I really had to focus on getting the more important parts of the drawing on the paper, like the line of movement in the body, the curves and the base shapes. At first I wasn't too good at this, as I wanted to try and get more detail into it, but I quickly learnt from my mistakes as I wasn't able to get the whole pose drawn in the short time. I was surprisingly happy about how some of them turned out, though there is definitely room for improvement - especially on relative size and anatomy.

We were then given twenty minutes to do a drawing on A2 black paper, focusing on the highlights and shadows rather than line work. I found this task quite tricky because my hand automatically wanted to draw an outline first, which we couldn't do, so I found myself working very slowly to try and make sure everything was in the right place. Our teacher came over and saw that I hadn't gotten a lot of drawing down yet, so she urged me to speed up and be more comfortable just putting marks down, which got me to get going and not worry so much. This task was to help us look more carefully at light and how it works on skin and different parts of the body, for example where there is less fat and more bone like the knees, smaller cylinder-like shapes like the arms, wider areas like the chest, etc. In the end, I really liked the rough look of the right leg and the shapes I was able to create, as well as other areas like the blended knee and the small highlights on his left arm, just showing it very delicately in the shadows. I think next time I should work faster from the beginning, as then I'd be able to put more shadows in and have more time to make sure there are highlights where there should be instead of a bit everywhere, which I think was my main downfall with this task.