Life Drawing 1/12/14

5 & 10 minute sketches in pencil

15 & 25 minute sketches

15 minute sketches, pen (left) and pencil

Life drawing 24/11/14

3 minute sketches 

10 minute sketches

5 minute sketches

5 mins and 15 mins

Life Drawing - 19/11/14

I found this session with pastels especially challenging. I found that building up a thick layer of different coloured pastels was most effective in representing the lights and shadows on skin tone, though this took some time so the shorter sketches were not so successful.

5 minute pastel sketches

shooting an arrow - 10 minute sketch

half hour standing study

Object Still Life: coloured

I chose to use oil pastels to capture my still life arrangement in colour.

Life Drawing 11/10/14

After making a study of the model in charcoal, chalk was then added to recreate areas of light and shadow. Then the whole piece was obliterated with chalk (after taking the photo below), and the study made again on the same paper.

chalk and charcoal on black sugar paper

chalk and charcoal on black sugar paper

Object still life: blue ballpoint

Continuing the series of Still life studies, this time the objects have been drawn in blue ballpoint pen, which proves surprisingly versatile in expressing dark and light values.

More Life Drawing 04/11/2014

5 minute poses with chair (pencil and ink pen on bottom right)

20 minute study in pencil

20 minute study in pencil

Life Drawing 04/11/14

This week's exercises helped to better familiarity with a variety of mediums: ballpoint pen, charcoal and calk. Usually I enjoy using ballpoint pen to draw, but the size of the paper makes my linework seem very weedy on this scale. Beginning a study in chalk on white paper was even more impossible than charcoal on black paper, but the addition of the contrasting medium created some eye-catching effects. I will aim to try bolder lines and smoother smudging when I next attempt charcoal.

5 mins poses in blue and green ballpoint pen

10 minute seated pose in blue ballpoint pen

10 minute charcoal pose

10 minute charcoal, 5 minute chalk pose

2 minute chalk 2 minute charcoal pose

More Life Drawing 28/10/14

For this session I decided to experiment with standard office ink pens (blue and black). It definitely makes you think twice before making a mark as it cannot be erased. For the subtler shadows a pencil still has an ink pen beaten, but the image doesn't leap off the page in the same way.

5 minute standing poses

seated poses

reclining pose

Life Drawing 28/10/14

Using a hand made ink pen and sumi ink made for some interesting results when trying to capture a live pose. It was hard to avoid a making tone that was too dark, so I resorted to a lot of small lines to represent shadow, which worked with mixed success. When working on the thick A2 paper I found an affective way of achieving a midtone was scraping away the ink and dyed wallpaper paste with the side of my ink pen.

5 minute standing poses

20 minute standing pose with water sprayed on the paper

seated study - ink on wallpaper paste.

Object Still Life - cross hatching

This time the objects were treated to a cross hatching technique. I think the most successful parts of the drawing are where I have followed the shape of the object with the line.

More Life Drawing 21/10/2014

I wanted to incorporate what I'd learnt today in some further studies, with a different model. The method I used here wasn't strictly cross hatching, but I've used what I learnt earlier to inform my drawing.

standing poses, 5 mins each

5 mins

20 min sketch

Life Drawing 21/10/14

3 mins warmup sketch

The focus of today's life drawing was on crosshatching to achieve an effect of shadow rather than filling the area smoothly. The method requires a lot of control and produces a study that looks controlled and delicate (in my case), but it has also taught me a lot and I'm looking forward to using it more.

seated with branch, 20+ mins

40 min study, progress sketch

40 minute reclining study

Object Still Life - smooth shading

approx. 2-3 hrs

This took a lot longer than expected and demanded a lot of control. This exercise has definitely shown me that I have a lot of room for improvement in drawing realistically! But I think I have learnt a lot about reflections - it is only looking at it now that I can see which reflection relates to other objects in the collection, and it's interesting to see the extent to which they interact with each other.

Life Drawing Sketches 14/10/14

Below are some sketches that really pushed me: the first two had to be drawn very quickly as the model held the pose for just a few seconds so that I hardly had time to look at the paper. I quite like the results, which flow and move more than a studied piece.

"indian dance" - 5 second poses

movement - 10 second poses

 Here, the model started on one side of the stepladder and transitioned to the other in four, 5 minute poses. I tried to distinguish each pose with a different pressure of line, but I think if I were to do it again the pose in the foreground would have the heavier line and get progressively lighter, not the other way around.

up and down a step ladder - 5 mins each pose

Life Drawing 14/10/14

roughly 45 minute study in pencil.

Object Still Life - Line drawing

approx. 30 minute study

The first study of grouped objects, a line sketch with minimal shading

Life Drawing 9/10/14

3x 5 minute poses

30 minute seated study

During this first session, the focus was on creating steady, firm lines that most accurately expressed the model's shape. It was necessary to observe the model very closely in order to reduce the number of needless lines.