Life drawing Winter 2011: part 1

I was back at life drawing class on Monday night. The first class of the Winter term and my first life drawing session of 2011. It felt great to be back after a couple of months hiatus.

We started with a 15 minute drawing:

Trying to capture the model's pose as well as the foreground/background relationship and having a go at creating some sense of focus shift, with contrasting mark making between each plane, was pretty ambitious - especially for such a relatively short pose. Fun though!

This next drawing is a study of a 10 minute pose:

Here I set out hoping to fully capture the sense of weight and the feeling of her sitting on the chair - but challenged myself to achieve that while drawing as little of the chair as possible. This helped me really look at what was going on in the body. Her posture, the shape of her supporting left hand, the way the flesh of her legs flattened against the seat, contrasting with the areas that didn't, the fold on her tummy, orientation of her shoulders to feet to neck etc.

After this we had a 40 minute reclining pose:

As you can see, I used the longer time to make a tonal study. For the final pose of the evening I decided to do the opposite and ignore tone:

But form and space were just as important to me here as in the tonal study. Contours in this drawing are concerned with depicting mass. The same thing I was doing in the previous drawing with tonal variations.

When investigating specific aspects of the drawing process or different drawing techniques, I find it very helpful to be selective with the areas of interest. The environment of a life drawing studio is perfect for this kind of thing.