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.