Life Draw­ing

Published Categorised as Art & Design 4 Comments on Life Draw­ing

Last night I went with some friends to a life draw­ing class in the base­ment of a pub in Stoke Newing­ton. I went to life draw­ing most weeks when I was in 6th form, but have been very sporad­ic­ally every since. I think the last time I went was 9 months ago. Usually they’re in some sort of neon-lit muni­cip­al hall. This one was in a purple room, with music play­ing and with the most flat­ter­ing light­ing I’ve ever seen at a life draw­ing class. It was nice, I’m going to go back. Usually return­ing to life draw­ing after a long break makes me want to cry in frus­tra­tion, because my pen just won’t do what I need it to do, but it wasn’t so bad this time. I didn’t produce anything of any value, but it was a good start, and I’ve lost the knack of fore­short­en­ing and hands. Here are my sketches. I had to resort to taping them to the door and photo­graph­ing them, because the paper was too big for the scan­ner. I always write comments all over my sketches. Is that the draw­ing equi­val­ent of talk­ing to your­self?

Life draw­ing classes are also a good real­ity check to remind you of what real people’s bodies look like outside of the photoshopped nonsense we are constantly fed from the media. People with bony bits, saggy bits, fat rolls and scars are often the best to draw. The model this time had a lovely smooth athlet­ic figure with no real protrud­ing bits, which is actu­ally more of a chal­lenge to draw, because it’s a flat/​curved plane with no interi­or details, so you have to get the exter­i­or shape totally right (I didn’t get it right this time). I’ve clearly been look­ing at too many Egon Schiele draw­ings for my own good. I also didn’t succeed in captur­ing the model’s face. Next time.

Initial crappy warm-up sketches drawn straight in pen.

Longer sketches. I tend to draw straight in pen, or just make a very basic pencil sketch for propor­tions. The more I fanny around with extens­ive pencil sketch­ing, the more tent­at­ive my final line seems to become. I am also not great at cross-hatch­ing or elab­or­ate shad­ing.

Longer poses. Didn’t quite get it right.

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4 comments

  1. The one the second page that has model Rebecca writ­ten across it,,,just an outline, with demarc­a­tion of the inner left arm is my favor­ite. The absence of the crook on that arm makes the shape. I love it.

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