[Drawing Lesson] 18/10/12 - Life Drawing starts again

During today's lesson we were all introduced to our life model for the day, Ricky. We each chose a place in the room to stand and draw and then we stared our first drawing, simply a standing pose. As the lesson went on we then started changing medium, paper, drawing length, drawing size ect. We roughly got around 10 drawings done, here is the first drawing:

We did a standard pose so our tutor Tom could see how well we draw life models. The pose was roughly 15 minutes to draw and I drew it using pencils. After drawing we were told to write down what we thought was positiveness and negative about the drawing. Here is what I put for positive:

1. Shading
2. Body proportions
3. Left arm

I had a strong fond for the shading in the picture, as I think I honestly got a fairly good accuracy on how much shadow was on the model. The body proportions is really good, though I am sticking to my old habit of drawing things off the paper which is what my old drawing tutor, Andrew told me. Also I think I captured the left arm on the model perfectly, it is in right proportion to the body and looks well, though the watch looks pretty tacky. Here is what I put for negative:

1. Feet cut off
2. Head too small
3. Right arm

As you saw above, I don't like the fact that I cut the feet off and is an old habit that I need to get rid of. The head is really mis-proportioned and i think looks too big, you may notice that I do this alot in my drawings, as when I draw my cartoon characters you'll notice the heads are rather big in comparison to the body's, something I should work on in the future. The right arm to me looks really off, nothing much more to say about that, I just really don't like it.

The next few drawings were experimental drawings, using different styles of drawing, I think I did this well in a sense, though you can't really say you've drawn something well when you are drawing with your wrong hand. Below is the drawing:

As you can see, it is very abstract with a different medium than before, pen. Each drawing was 5 minutes each so we had little time to go overly into detail. Below I go into detail about the drawings:

The top left drawing is purely in pen, I usually draw my characters in pen so I didn't find this as challenging as you would have thought. The top right is drawn with my left hand (wrong hand), I found this rather difficult to do as I am really bad with my left hand. This made me focus on the model alot more so I didn't loose track on what I was drawing, essentially making it a fairly accurate drawing. The middle left is drawn with my fingers at the bottom on the pen nib pointing directly down, this was incredibly challenging as you couldn't see where you was drawing, this made the model look very off in my opinion but gave him a strange character, by which I mean gives him some form of cartoonic personality. The middle right is drawn with my finger and thumb at the very top of the pen, essentially an incredibly hard task to do, honestly I think the drawing..... could be better. It is incredibly abstract and very unlike the model, let alone an actual person. The very bottom drawing is pretty much not letting the pen let go of the paper, we have done a similar task like this last year but in pencil, doing it in pen is hard enough as you can't erase or ease any mistakes.

For the final few drawings we used mixed media, chalk to be precise. Below are the drawings:

We drew the model in chalk, and then after we created a large chalk section and drew the model using an eraser, however after transporting the drawings from class the drawing got overly smudged and you cannot see them. Just before the lesson finished we drew the model in a sequence of drawings, I chose the draw him very basically for this task as we had roughly 30 seconds per drawing.

Overall I think the first life drawing lesson went really well, I really liked the lesson and it got me into the swing of life drawing again. Next week we'll have our old life model in again, Steve... Oh the memories.