Session 4 - 16/10/12

Last week we were informed that our next two sessions would be focussed on life drawing, and we would be off to one of the art studios to draw a nude model. Not having done this before, i was intrigued by the prospect and after the first session i can say it's a very interesting experience.

This session focussed on using different techniques to draw the model such as Contour drawing, using charcoal sticks to draw, using visual measurements to make sure the proportions of our drawings were correct.

You can see all my work below.

Above you can see the results from my first two drawing. On the left is a drawing created using the contour lines, as you can see the result is a tad vertically disproportioned. I am under the impression that i failed to follow the proper technique in this drawing as i spent a fair amount of time looking at the paper and moving the pencil around freely.

The second drawing here was created with paticular attention to the shading, using the mark-making to show form and shadow, i think this can out far better than the first drawing.

Next we drew the model stood in 3 different poses, but were asked to over lay them, in addition to this we were only given five minutes to draw each posed, which should explain the very barebones look of this drawing.

After this we were introduced to charcoal drawing and given a chance to use it ourselves. Above you can see the result of my effort, what i found to be kind of a double-edged sword for using charcoal was the very fragile nature of the lines you drew, on the one hand this meant that you could make any corrections fairly easily. On the other, it meant shading became quite difficult, i found it quite difficult to make any kind of transition from a darker black to a lighter shade without erasing the original line. Either way i was fairly pleased with how my charcoal drawing came out, though i would quite like another attempt to use it and hopefully do better.

Above you can see my final drawing from this session. We were introduced to using a pencil to measure the height of your subject matter in a way that meant you can transfer it to paper and retain the correct proportions. After this we were given 50 minutes to make one final drawing of the model and to use our new technique to do it.
As you can see, that proportioning is not really evident in this piece, at least with the arm and leg in the background. Despite this, i was very pleased with the outcome, or part of it at least. I believe i captured the head and facial expression fairly accurately.


I did quite enjoy this session, mostly because my skills were noticeably improved even in the space of a few hours. I'm now quite looking forward to the next in which i hope to keep improving.