Life Drawing - Week 1

I've started going to a Life Drawing class one evening a week at The Prince's Drawing School. It's a great building with fantastic studio space and conditions perfectly suited to productive drawing sessions. I've only had one class so far and it felt really well structured, covering short and long poses:

We started with some warm-up sketches, each pose lasting 3-5 minutes:



followed by some longer exercises in depicting the space...



...and how it relates to the model:



The last two drawings were both 30-minute poses, until finally we had a couple of hour-long poses:





Drawing from focussed observation is intense but highly rewarding - it's such an effective way to learn the essentials of drawing - perspective, form, composition, proportion, foreshortening etc. Obviously, as with everything, the more time you spend doing it, the richer your understanding of it becomes. The class runs all through summer - I intend to chart my progress here every week, in addition to all the other stuff.