My first proper life drawing lesson began this week with an actual life model, and not a student or Cecil the skeleton! Above is the drawing I did on black paper with white chalk, to get used to highlighting certain parts of the body instead of drawing the outline straight away. Fair to say, I'm pretty proud of myself with this one! There are some parts of the body that are dis-proportioned and the lil the model was lying on looks…weird. But you can tell what position the model is in and which parts of the body represent the lightened areas through my highlighting. On this day I haven't done proper life drawing in a long time and to draw this with a material I'm not fond of made me feel good about myself!
There are two parts to the drawing above. The scribbles on the left wasn't me letting out my frustration, it's an actual exercise. An exercise which required to draw the model without looking at my paper AND without my charcoal being taken off the paper. It's obvious I failed in doing the latter but not being able to look at the paper was HORRIBLE. The exercise forces you to not look at the paper so much, since many people aren't used to looking at a model and therefore draw from memory (something you should do in life drawing), but if you ever decide to do life drawing, you will hate this exercise. From my point of view, the drawing ended up looking like a crap art-house film poster; a feeble attempt to draw people in through it "symbolic" work of art about reflection. It's some scribbles on a page, nothing more.
The drawing on the right, while much better than the scribbles, still looks a little off to me. The life drawing of the 'pathetic pirate' looks reasonably good if you didn't know what the model really looked like. In reality, the model has a wide torso with not so long legs and slightly more muscular arms. The drawing I did here makes him more squashed and thin than he should be. This all goes back to my own style of drawing, which is more cartoony, with large expressive eyes and the body parts are made up of simple shapes with no so many curves. My style is reflected in a lot of my life drawings and clearly doesn't work. This is a problem I will always have to work on.
I AM NOT THIS GOOD AT LIFE DRAWING. REPEAT, I AM NOT THIS GOOD AT LIFE DRAWING. Now that we've got that out of the way, no this isn't one of my drawings, not really. The exercise that lead to this drawing was to spend 2 minutes on drawing the model and then go to another person's drawing and add to theirs. The drawing above is the drawing I was first to draw. The sketchy outline of this drawing is mine. The added in details that made this drawing a whole lot better was done by other students. And boy, am I impressed! The animation industry constantly passes character and background designs to different artists to see if they can add to the concept. People are going to tamper with you're precious art for better or worse that this exercise is a good way for us to get used to it! This drawing definitely came out for the better!
These final sketches are rough 2 minute drawings to help us warm up. Warm-up drawings are always a good way to get prepare your hand for some serious drawing! The poses themselves…I could've done a lot better but warm-ups aren't supposed to be that great anyway! These drawings also help on my view of perspective, which is one of my weakest skills in life drawing.
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