Life Drawing: Autumn '09 pt. 5

This session bagan with a series of 30 second poses. My usual response to such short poses is to draw the silhouette by blocking in large shapes that feel representative of the angles I see at first glance. Not sure how effective this is, but the process does seem to help me get the full pose (i.e. head to toe) drawn in, one way or another:



Drawing this quickly forces me to feel my way round the drawing, albeit frantically, the results of which can be pretty hit and miss:


The great thing about starting off with a dozen or so short poses, is that it puts you in a great frame of mind when you leap up to a 10 minute pose like this:


Here, I still blocked in my main shapes in the first minute or so, then had much more time to go over them - improving on the pose, altering angles (eg. wrists, knees) and building detail.

This next pose was actually held for 30 minutes, but I chose to study it from a different angle every 10 minutes:



As you can see, by the third drawing I felt I had a deeper understanding of the subject. I feel this drawing has a clearer sense of mass and weight distribution. The pose also feels more balanced on a graphic / tonal level.

Here's a couple of random 5 minute studies from the session:



The longest pose of the evening was 30 minutes:

Can't decide how I feel about this one, my instinct tells me it looks way too laboured which explains why there's no sense of life to it at all.

I feel better about this one: