Life drawing session

After a set of initial warm up session we went to a 15m pose, and I decided to go for tonal work this time:

Part 4 Reflection

Approach and Progress

As noted previously, I knew from the start of the course that part 4 would be a challenge for me. I started making progress with Life Drawing classes, but a change of working approach made it much more difficult to get to these sessions as much as I’d like. Strangely, therefore, I’ve been doing less life drawing during the Part 4 than I did earlier in the course.

Life drawing session

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Project 6 The Head

Exercise 1 Facial features

Initial practice for the exercise:

Project 5 The moving figure

Comparison of movement representations

The course notes suggest:

Look at the energy in this fast brush drawing by Richard Hambleton; …Now go to David Haines’ website and find  the drawing New Balance Sneakers vs KFC Bucket. Note the more restrained movement of the figures …

The two images are:

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  Osaka, 1981, Richard Hambleton from https://ewilsonart.wordpress.com/2017/07/14/part-4-project-5-research-point-compare-richard-hambleton-osaka-and-david-haines-balance-sneakers-vs-kfc-bucket/

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  New Balance Sneaker vs KFC Bucket from http://www.davidhaines.org/work04.html

As the course notes indicate, these are very different approaches to drawing movement. They both use the stance of the subjects as part of conveying the movement in the scene. David Haines’ scene is rendered almost as a fast frame photograph and has taken many hours to complete. Richard Hambleton’s, in contrast, feels like it was painted in near real time.

Project 4 Structure

Exercise 1 The structure of the human body

Hands

After many poor starts I managed to get some sketches of hands that I was basically happy with, based on online hand studies:

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Project 2 Proportion

Reflection

Looking back at my life drawing and other figurative drawing so far, the correct representation of the model’s proportions has been an on-going challenge. My progress isn’t linear in any way, and often feels like one step forwards and five back. This is, therefore, an area rich for practice and study.

Life Drawing

This is my first session in quite a while, and it shows:

The only one I really like is the 15 minute pose from behind, where I concentrated more on tone than line. For the 20 minute pose I managed to get lost in proportions, and didn’t have time to fix it. I think it was the foreshortening  on the leg that threw me. It was a similar story with the final pose, although here I realised my mistake (which was the angle of the back this time) with enough time left for a partial fix.

In terms of moving forwards, I need to keep practising and so need to find a way to get to life drawing sessions more reliably. That is going to be a challenge given the timings of my new role.

Life Drawing

I found this session interesting, as it concentrated on tone provided by having a shaded ground and then adding/subtracting. The first is white paper with charcoal, and the next two black paper with white chalk.

Life Drawing Meetup

I’ve found another source of life drawing to try. This is in Canterbury and centred around Meet-up. The session was of a fairly normal structure, but I was somewhat happier with the results.

First a set of 1 minute poses to warm up:

Life Drawing 4/9

The next of my Life Drawing sessions. We started with a blind contour drawing

Croquis Cafe Heads Up 2

Worked through this video:

First a series of 2 minute poses..