Life Drawing

Today we had a life drawing workshop to develop our drawing abilities. I have done life drawing quite a lot before and I really enjoy it. We started the day with some fast poses only being a couple of minutes. These drawings weren’t as successful as I found I needed these poses to get into looking and drawing correctly to adjust back to proportions. After, we did some poses where the model was wearing a kimono. I enjoyed these clothed poses, drawing the movement of the silk was very interesting and created different shapes and areas of light and dark. We then went back to nude poses which were longer of about 20 minutes. After getting the proportions right I tried to focus on the tone of the body capturing the areas of dark and light.

I mainly used charcoal as I like the bold line it creates as well as how quick it is to use which creates dynamic lines. I also tried adding blocks of bright colour to the pages to make the images more exciting as allows certain areas to be highlighted. Something I have struggled with before with life drawing is trying to capture the whole body onto the page so this time I tried working smaller and this allowed me to draw the whole pose meaning I could work with all the shapes the body created to create a more whole image. Something I am still struggling with is hands and faces which I find very hard to draw so I need to sit down and study these areas in greater depth to improve my work.

At the end of the day we went round looking at everyone’s work, on the whole I was very pleased with my work but I liked some of the ideas others had. In particular I liked Jad’s idea of using black tape to isolate areas which created a collage element which was more exciting to look at. Another technique I liked was to use the side of the charcoal stick to add in tone which gave a more textured effect.