Drawing Week: Day 2

Today's class started off with a 30 minute pose:



followed by a 30 minute drawing of the same pose from memory. Just like the memory drawings from yesterday, the model was asked to leave the room and we were told to put away the first drawing and start on a clean sheet and draw what we could remember.

Here's my drawing from memory:



In this drawing I also picked up where I'd left off yesterday by including elements from the model's environment. Doing this makes me appreciate the spacial context in drawings made by my favourite artists. It's a quality I hope to achieve one day in the stuff I'm doing - and developing this awareness is crucial in life drawing classes.

Composition is also something I'm trying to be more conscious of, even when it's as simple as the size and shape of the paper I'm drawing on in relation to the subject I want to draw. Sounds obvious but in practice it reveals itself as a crucial part of the picture-making process and one that's deceptively simple.

Like with this 5 minute study:



Simple, but effective. I reckon the drawing would lose most of it's meaning if I cropped the paper to surround the figure evenly.

This drawing is of a 40 minute pose:



Using the diamond shape of the rug, I chose to draw specific elements from the model's environment to build a pyramid-like hierarchy in the picture which I hoped would bring order and balance to the overall design and keep the focus on his face. This is where spacial context helped keep the drawing from feeling too static - at least I hope it did.

Here's a 30 minute pose drawn from the life model and then from memory:



Can you tell I had trouble recalling her posture? lol!

Our final pose was split up in the same way. The first is from the life model and the second from memory:



With this last drawing I tried to bring together everything I had been studying in the previous drawings - like framing the composition, deciding on which elements to include from the environment and why. Drawing from memory like this is a terrific opportunity to invent and to liberate yourself from the overbearing presence of the life model that you're usually compelled to "get right", whatever that is.