Life Drawing Autumn 2011 - 05

I struggled with a reclining pose at drawing class the other night. I drew it several times trying to get the shapes right, sadly I didn't quite get it before the session came to a close. A couple of the better drawings:

Life Drawing Autumn 2011 - 04

A quick sketch I did the other night at life drawing class:

Life Drawing Autumn 2011 - 03

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

Life Drawing Autumn 2011 - 02

Here's a study I made in drawing class last night:

Life Drawing Autumn 2011 - 01

I attend life drawing class once a week at The Prince's Drawing School in Shoreditch. Here's a drawing I made the other night:

Cat-like shapes x5

Here's the last set of drawings from my brief cat sketching session last weekend. I'd better make time for more sketching or I'll have nothing to post next week.

Chubby cat-like shapes x3

Some quick sketches of my neighbour's cat:

Cat-like shapes in conversation

Cat-like shapes x2

Some sketches of my neighbour's cat:

Life Drawing Spring Term: Week 8 - 2 minute drawings #FTW

Here are some of my drawings from the final life drawing session of this term. These are 2 minute poses, drawn in pencil on cartridge paper:













I did a couple of longer drawings too (30 mins each), but I'm so disappointed with them that I almost didn't add them to this post:




but then I realised they'd show why I think the 2 minute drawings are more successful, without me having to do it in words.

This 1 minute sketch does a better job than that last 30 minute drawing:



Not a lot I can say other than I'm unhappy with my level of engagement with my subject, it's patchy at best, and I feel I really need to shake things up with my process during the summer break before class resumes in Autumn.

Life Drawing Spring Term: Week 6 pt. 2

In part 1 I wrote a little bit about the lack of "connectedness" showing up in my life drawings. I'm sure it's always been there in all of my drawings, in varying amounts, but I suppose I've only started picking up on it fairly recently which is causing me no end of frustration at the moment.

Take this drawing of a 20 minute pose from the session on Monday night:



This is a perfect example of my tendency to quickly block in the elements of interest and proceed to get busy with tone, adding odd bits of details here and there, while forgetting to see whether those elements relate to each other in a meaningful way. Which they don't.

In fairness, I'll admit I've made a few decent observations and choices, such as the the weight of the legs as they hang off the chair arm (observation) and the decision to contrast the paleness of her skin with the darker tone of the chair (choice).

Observations and choices like these are few and far between in my latest bunch of drawings and in this case create quite a fragmented picture. Let me elaborate further:



At my most positive, I'll accept the feeling of the organic leg forms against the sturdy sofa. And by way of that contrast the shape of the thighs and dangle of feet convey a sense of flesh and bone. And the background elements kinda imply a sense of space, an environment.

But that is only one half of the drawing.

Let's look at the other half:


Here, there is a sense of space implied behind the chair - it's minimal because there's so much going on tonally, between the sofa, cushion, her hair and some vague shadows under the sofa. However, the forms from her rib cage through to her hips are passable at best (but not really passable).

And here comes the big reveal, as I take another look at the whole drawing:



it's suddenly very clear that those two halves are incredibly disconnected. For instance, setting aside the issue of proportion, just follow the forms from one end of the figure along to the other end - they clearly don't relate to one another. This is what I mean by that lack of consistency or connectedness in my drawing as a whole. It's that extra bit of follow through that is missing.

I'm not trying to explain my work but rather I'm trying to understand why I'm dissatisfied with it. Fortunately, I became aware of the central problem with this drawing in the final 3 minutes of making it, so I quickly tore out a sheet of paper and placed it over the left half and drew over the parts that I felt were most problematic:



Hopefully this 60 second sketch demonstrates what I've been saying in this blog post. At the time, it certainly confirmed the issues I tend to have when attempting to make a meaningful life drawing.

In the final minute of the pose, I put all these drawings aside and grabbed my pen and sketchbook and drew "blind":



To me, of all the drawings I made in the session, this one feels the most engaging and most connected throughout - no doubt partly thanks to the process of "drawing blind" (more about this process here). Quick drawings like this feel fresher and much more honest than the longer ones, so I really want to try and retain those qualities regardless of how long I spend on a single drawing.

As I struggle to improve my skills through life drawing, blogging my efforts creates a diary / visual record that I can go through at any time to remind myself of the stuff I've learned. And right now it's also helping to exorcise my current drawing woes as I experience them.

We also made "drawings" with plasticine in this session, I'll blog those tomorrow.

Life Drawing Spring Term: Week 6 pt. 1

The other night I tweeted about my latest struggles at life drawing class:

Back from a rather frustrating life drawing class. Studio, model & tutor were all brilliant but I'm having an "AARGH I cannot draw!" day :(09:59 PM (GMT) Jun 7th via HootSuite

And here are some of the drawings I made earlier that evening:

A 10 minute drawing in pencil on cartridge paper, drawn using an "imagined projected technique". What the hell does that mean? Well, basically, when I drew this I was actually facing the model's front, while attempting to draw the parts of the pose I couldn't see - i.e. all the bits you see in this drawing were drawn from the opposite side of the angle depicted. Doing this is a great way to highlight just how carelessly I draw most of the time. It's through such exercises that I hope to improve my level of engagement with my subject. Easier said than done, hence the frustration in that tweet. And the distorted floor. And the impossible torso twist and the vague forms in general.

Here's a 30 minute drawing of the same model sitting down (drawn the normal way):

While not the most frustrating drawing of the evening, it still doesn't hold together for me all the way through. I'm pleased with how the head and shoulders turned out, particularly the tilt of the head and the orientation of the shoulders which together convey the sense of weight I observed in the pose (see detail below)

but I can't say the same for the rest of the drawing - especially from the naval down and across her legs to the floor. It's this lack of connectedness and follow through in the drawing as a whole that represents what I find most challenging at life drawing class.

I find it ironic that I should struggle so much with seeing the bigger picture, when I've been told many times by clients and colleagues that that is one of my strengths. Hmmm. I now choose to believe my own eyes.

There are more examples from this life drawing session that further illustrate my issues with consistency in drawing, specifically proportions and attention to the form. I'll blog these tomorrow.

Drawing Week: Day 3

Here's a collection of drawings I made today at life drawing class. Like before, we began this session by drawing a 30 minute pose from observing the model, followed by a drawing from memory of the same pose. Dig:



Oddly, the one from memory feels more real to me, despite the proportions and weight being way off from the real thing. I suppose that's the point of a memory drawing - it being a metaphor for discovering one's inner view of the outer world, and discover self, even if it is at first on a superficial and somewhat visually warped level.

Check out these two 40 minute poses, first in pencil on cartridge paper:



then in conte on watercolour paper:



When drawing each of these, I remember being quite aware of the twists in their bodies and trying to empathise with the physicality of the pose as I drew it. Not easy.

Speaking of empathy in drawing, drawing "blind" is a great exercise to help you become aware of that concept. The idea is that you draw the model without ever looking down at your paper (hence "drawing blind") and ideally never taking your pencil (or pen, brush etc.) off the sheet. This is the complete opposite to drawing from memory because the only thing you can do here is draw directly from life i.e. observing and recording simultaneously.

Here's one I "drew blind" while focussing purely on the model:


As with many drawing exercises, it's really about the process, not the end result and is assessed accordingly. However I must admit the results are intriguing, but I'm biased because I can recall what I was doing when making most of these lines.

Here's another one I "drew blind", while extending my attention to include the space the model was in:


The final two drawings of the day were made through an exercise that dealt with the subject of space in a very direct way - by making a single mark on the sheet for every single object you could see in the studio. Sounds bizarre right? And it made absolutely no sense to me until I followed through with the process.

Predictably, such a drawing by me looks a bit like this:



but rather unpredictably, the image I produced made perfect sense to me and as it emerged gradually over 40 minutes or so of concentrated mark-making, revealed itself to be incredibly spacial - a quality I consider severely lacking in my regular attempts at drawing from life.



This exercise in particular helped me realise that when I draw, in my head I frequently default to naming the elements I see according to preconceived notions of what they should look like rather than what they actually do look like and crucially, where they specifically exist in relation to each other and me.

Remarkably, those dots on the page bring more meaning to the untouched areas of the page than any drawings I've ever made previously. A head-fuck I'll be pondering for some time to come.

Life Drawing: Autumn '09 pt. 7

Like the previous life drawing class, in this session I experimented with directional mark making. Once again we had a mix of standing and sitting poses.

These poses were held for around 10 minutes:



So the idea here was to describe the surface with the direction of the pencil strokes as well as building tonal relationships across the figure. I drew these poses to the full height of an A4 sheet. Had I drawn them smaller, I may have been able to include the environment and give each one of these quick drawings more tonal context.

We had about 30 minutes on this one:

Clearly a much more pleasing result with some thought given to the environment, although I do think the strokes outside the figure are a bit lazy - too much of a graphic interpretation of the light which distracts from the figure.

Dig this 15 minute pose:

I remember struggling with the foreshortening quite a bit!

The final drawing of the session was this 40 minute pose:

A much more careful study with subtle tonal shifts, don't you think?