Life drawing

For one college week (4 days) we did life drawing, something I'd never tried before.

We were given a handout telling us how to fit the figure on the page using the simple straight arm method of measuring; I was aware of measuring with a pencil but I'd never really done it before. Using the pencil and my thumb I held my arm out straight and counted the amount of 'heads' there were in the body. I then transferred this amount to paper, deciding how big I wanted the image to be and then dividing that space into however many heads I counted.

I then continued to use my measuring with the pencil and my thumb to see exactly what part of the body fitted into which section I'd divided up on my page. I found this process really useful but in order for it to be effective I had to stand in the same place, so that my measurements would always be the same - this was something I found difficult but it wasn't a huge problem.






This was my first drawing with a 3B pencil - all the pencil drawings were 3B



I found this drawing quite difficult, as the chair was really challenging to include. I think from the waist downwards everything is too big and curvy.

I tried to be more conscious of the quality of line I was making with this drawing; I tried to use lighter lines throughout and use darker, more confident lines for areas where there was more shadow. This pose was chosen specifically to get us to use the foreshortening technique but my position in the room didn't allow much of this. However, with the arm and leg on the left there is some slight foreshortening which I didn't find too challenging to do.

This is a charcoal drawing, first sketched out lightly in pencil. I'd never really used charcoal before but I was advised to think of the different shades of light/dark in 5 categories (very dark, dark, medium, light, very light) and this helped. The subject's pose was more challenging for me as he was leaning back slightly and should therefore have appeared slightly slanted - I tried to include a plinth in the background which was straight, so that any leaning of the subject would be emphasised but it still didn't really work. Ultimately though this was a tonal exercise and I think it went well.

This drawing and the next one down are my favourite two. We started by using masking tape to create a rectangle on the page and then filled the entire square with smudged charcoal, making sure to only put down a light layer so that we could erase it to include light areas. I used charcoal to draw, instead of using pencil, and then concentrated on the light and dark areas, using the charcoal and an eraser to do this by pressing lighter and harder depending on the tone I wanted. This was the first drawing where I paid attention to the background and it definitely made a huge difference; for example, it helped me when choosing the right tone for the body when I had the dark curtain and the light wall in the background to use as a reference. When the drawing was finished I removed the masking tape border which made the drawing look really neat.

Like the drawing above, I really like this one. It was the first drawing I did where the whole body wasn't required to fit on the page, instead being told to concentrate just on the head and torso. Again, we used masking tape to make a rectangle and then filled the space with smudged charcoal. Working with a bigger body, I felt more confident with my lines but this often made them very dark and messy which I later needed to clean up. The background was distinctly split into a dark area and a light area so the mid-tone body really stands out. I was more subtly with my erasing in this drawing, trying to get a wider range of tones.

After splitting the page into 8 sections, we had about 15-20 minutes to draw using different techniques. The model changed poses for every drawing. The first two drawings were simple sketches using a biro - the inclusion of the chair was something I found really difficult and I had trouble fitting it in accurately with the body, particularly with the legs (as the first drawing shows). The third drawing was done with black ink and matchsticks which I really liked; the matchsticks allowed the lines to be a little more clumsy and scratchy. The fourth drawing was with twigs and ink which basically the same as the matchsticks but just a little more uncontrollable. The fifth and final drawing was with matchsticks and ink but was about building up the image through crosshatching.

We split the page into 8 sections, like before, and used a more experimental method of mark-making for each section, again just for 15-20 minutes. The first section was a close-up of any part of the body using matchsticks and ink - I did a close-up of the arm. The next was a painted tonal piece with acrylic paint, again of a close-up part of the body - I did the foot. I find acrylic paint really difficult to work with and I think this shows in the picture - it looks really messy and  bulky. The other 4 squares were about experimenting with the ink and small chunks of wax; it was difficult to see the lines you were making with the wax so it was rarely anatomically correct. The top two experiments with wax are quite basic and juvenile but the bottom two, I think, are more adventurous; I carefully drew out the figure in wax and then experimented with how to put the ink on. I tried dribbling it down and I tried a striped pattern and I'm pleased with how it only reveals part of the image, instead of all of it in a big black square. The face on the right was drawn out with wax and I then tried to water the ink down to achieve areas of light/dark.