Ascent - Drawings From Life

Ascent - Drawings From Life from Rafianimates on Vimeo.

A short film reflecting on my experience at life drawing class.

All drawings were created by me during one session in March 2011, in the life drawing studio at The Prince's Drawing School, Shoreditch, London.

Images - Rafianimates
http://www.rafianimates.co.uk

Music - osymyso
http://www.osymyso.com

Another scratchy pen drawing...

...of some bloke I saw on the tube.

Caricature Study Part 1: facial expressions

As you may have gathered from my recent posts (Amy Winehouse, Jack Lemon, politician) I've been dabbling in caricature lately. Aside from being a lot of fun, this is helping me improve my ability to capture the essence of a character. By making a close study of people's unique visual traits, I hope to improve my work as a character designer and cartoonist.

A big part of capturing someone's character is their expression, so a couple of weekends ago, at the drawing school, I decided to spend some time studying exactly that. Here are some of the sketches I made of our life model's facial expressions. She was constantly looking around, chatting away, so I had to draw fast and constantly reposition myself so I could see as much of her face as possible:

Caricature sketch of an anonymous generic politician

Caricature sketch of an anonymous generic politician I saw on tv.

Jack Lemon

A very quick doodle I made while watching Billy Wilder's The Apartment last night:

Amy Winehouse

Looking down

Sketches of two guys I saw on the tube.

Waiting for the train

Quick gesture drawing of two people who were, like me, waiting for the train.

Fat cat preachin' 'bout growth 9_9

Spaghetti Western Clichés

I often doodle during meetings, usually abstract shapes and squiggly lines. So I have no idea why this time I doodled spaghetti western type characters! On paper these guys are tiny, about half an inch to an inch high and were obviously drawn in seconds.






And here's how they'd look put together in a lineup:

Man reading a book

Just got home from the final life drawing class of this term and I'm exhausted! I have mixed feelings about the stuff I drew there tonight, so I'll blog those drawings at some point later, once I've gathered my thoughts.

On the tube ride home I couldn't resist doing a very quick drawing a man sat opposite me reading a book:

Asleep on the train

A quick sketch of someone I saw falling asleep on the train.

Drawing of a girl reading a book

Quick drawing of some bum I saw on the train

Quick drawing of a man I saw on the train

The dim and distant past

Life drawing winter 2011: part 9 - struggle

Here's a drawing I made last night at life drawing class:



50 x 40
Conté on watercolour paper.

I made several more but they're such abominations I didn't think they were worth including. I think this one is probably the least unappealing of them, although I struggled with it intensely from beginning to end.

Drawing can sometimes feel like wrestling with a giant walrusoctopus. A hungry one. I tell myself that these moments of struggle and extreme frustration are a sign that I'm pushing my limits and therefore are key to breaking through to the next level of my development.

It's so true that getting good at the principles of your craft needs to come first but it's clear to me that you've also got to keep coming back to them, forever, if you want to advance.

Another Untitled Life Drawing

Bird scribbles

Thumbnail drawings of some birds I saw at the zoo:

Gesture Drawings: studying the essentials in a pose

With these drawings I was trying to figure out how much I could leave out and still convey the character of a pose. In other words I wanted to know what it took to make the central idea of a drawing as clear as possible. Each of these poses took 10 seconds to draw:




By the fourth drawing much of the detail is gone but all the essentials are retained. Whittling down to this drawing I felt strongly that certain areas of the pose were just too important to leave out, and more importantly, get wrong. Things like the line of action through the body, the tilt in the head, placement of the feet, the feeling of his arms folded and against his chest. Capturing all of these, and their relationships, seemed equally important to conveying a clear sense of the character of the pose.

Missing Canary

Gesture drawings: shooting pool

A few 10 second poses of someone playing pool.

Life drawing winter 2011: part 8, drawing 2 of 2

Here's the second drawing I made the other night at life drawing class (see the first one here)



50 x 40
Conté stick on watercolour paper

Right from the start I found the perspective in this drawing super challenging. Dealing with the dramatic shift in scale across and down the figure while having an almost aerial viewpoint of the upper body was tricky work. For example, the radical difference in size between the arms seem at odds with the even flatness of his chest. But that's how it looked. Although his thighs travel almost parallel to our picture plane, the lower half of his body recedes pretty rapidly - notice how little of his left leg/foot is visible past the knee which makes his right arm feel disproportionately long. That arm is the only fully visible limb which adds to the confusion.

I realised pretty quickly that drawing the figure alone wasn't working so I started over and included the space in which our model was posing, in the hope that it would help me convey a sense of that perspective better.

Ultimately, as is often the case, I had to work hard to see everything as shapes instead of falling into the habit of labeling things as I went along - like thinking to myself "the hand is pressing against the thigh which has the other thigh resting half on top" and so on. Referring to individual parts like this stops me from thinking of the picture as a whole and always results in a really disconnected drawing.

So with this drawing I tried to continuously observe the whole scene and build everything up together by constantly relating back and forth as I drew. Looking solely at the values i.e. the relative darkness or lightness of all the elements in the drawing, the surrounding space also creates a tonal context for the figure.

All of this leads me to think that any drawing that holds together well (I'm not saying this one does) has to be sensitive to the relationship between each of its visual components. Surely developing the picture as a whole must help get to that.

Life drawing winter 2011: part 8, drawing 1 of 2

Here's one of the drawings I made last night at life drawing class:



50 x 40
Conté stick on watercolour paper.

I'll post the other one tomorrow.

Man on a box

I had a tough time wrestling with this sketch. Working out the scale of the overlapping shapes in this foreshortened view of the figure really confused me.

Ouch

Gesture Drawing: Catch and release - thumbnail drawings

Gesture Drawing: Squat and stretch - thumbnail drawings

Some more gesture drawings of 10 second poses:



Being presented with contrasting poses like these is pretty cool because I get to study the inherent forces that make up two opposite ends of a movement.



Comparing the overall shape of a squat pose with the overall shape of a stretch pose helps me understand how much the body distends and extends even within natural and non-extreme movement.

Gesture Drawing: Action Poses - thumbnail drawings part 1

I recently posted a bunch of gesture drawings and also shared some of my thoughts on the process of drawing 30 second poses in one of those posts, touched on my attempts at incorporating space and composition into that process in another and then added a bit more in one more post.

Trying to capture the pose of a full figure within 30 seconds can be pretty challenging and trying to do the same with 10 second poses is, predictably, three times harder! Here's how they turned out:



It's worth pointing out that each of these figures is roughly the size of a postage stamp. Faced with such short time my response was to draw small, the logic being there'd be less distance (across the paper) to travel.



Working like this means you end up with what animators call "thumbnail" drawings - tiny drawings that communicate the essence of a pose i.e. a drawing that:

• has a clear line of action
• effectively shows how weight is distributed in the pose
• describes the entire pose using only the main shapes
• consequently discards superfluous detail
• is easy to read as a silhouette

I'll admit drawing this way gets pretty frantic at times, especially when the model switches poses every 10 seconds like clockwork, leaving you no choice but to move on to the next drawing. Mind you, the relentless pace always pays off because I come away with a healthy reminder of what lies at the heart of any good image with a strong visual statement.

Gesture drawing from a life model continues to have a positive effect on my approach to character design, illustration, story boarding, photography and of course planning locomotion and performance in character animation.

Life drawing winter 2011: part 7

Here are some more drawings I made the other night at life drawing class:



They're too big to scan so I had to photograph them, which isn't ideal because they were done on newsprint.



Each one was drawn entirely without lifting the pencil off the surface of the paper, a great drawing exercise that I never tire of.



I enjoy working like this because it really helps the ol' hand-eye coordination.



The whole process is very engaging, especially when you're fighting the urge to lift the pencil off the paper whilst actively trying to identify and represent the shapes as you see them.



All of the above poses were held for 2 - 5 minutes.

The ones in charcoal, below, were held for 10 - 20 minutes:

Taking a single line "for a walk" as it were, is enormously satisfying because you're consciously making connections, physically and mentally, between shapes as you observe the pose. This transforms the often passive act of simply looking into a much more active one of truly seeing what's in front of you.

I have a tendency to press way too hard when I draw, so with these final charcoal drawings I made a conscious effort to ease off a bit which obviously allowed much more variation in line weight. Working in charcoal also allowed a lot of room for tonal variation to creep in.

Still determined to draw without lifting off the paper, I used my left hand to push tone around while my right continued with the lines, thick and thin, dark and light.

This particular exercise really improves my sense of proportion and helps me to create drawings that feel more connected. Fun stuff.