Week 13 - Life Drawing

 This week we had a model in for some life drawing:

 

 I started initally using pencil in my sketchbook, but I was running out of space, and you can see me trying to save paper by drawing a bit too small on some of these pages.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 We also got to practice drawing movement:

 

 

 

 

The way I normally try to convey movement is to take screenshots of videos, a tehcnique I saw originally on youtube from Ethan Becker (Becker 2020), but trying to draw a slowly moving model was an interesting challenge, I made sure to keep checking/ looking back and fourth between the page and the model.

Then the lecturer suggested I try charcoal, I'm just sort of filing the edges down on the paper/ in the space next to a drawing.

 

 

 

 I had a habit of making the feet look 2D - I do struggle with drawing feet and shoes, etc. after these two sketches above I added contour lines and shaded the side of the foot to try and imply a 3D form.

 

 

 

I struggled drawing the head and how it connected to the body here, so I did a zoom-in and tried drawing just the head and shoulders. Charcoal is both very forgiving because you can almost just brush off mistakes, but also not that forgiving in this case, as at this scale it wasn't that precise. drawing bigger would help a lot here - I've ordered an A3 sketchbook so that should help with this.

We did do some 3 minute cool down sketches after these 20 minute studies, but I can't remeber what order these were all in so I tried to organise them based on the drawing time.

Drawing with charcoal was incredibly fun and really loosened up these sketches/ studies, it felt more like painting. It was also, however, incredibly messy, my hands were covered in it within minutes and it kept smudging on the page. It'll still smudge, but it might hold better on sketchbook/ cartridge paper. 

Because even the small stick was way thicker than pencil, I used it to focus on the forms and shadows rather than outlines.

 

Reference/s: 

 

NEVER DRAW FROM PHOTO REFERENCE! | (Drawing Tablet Giveaway!), 2020. [YouTube] Ethan Becker, 9 March. Available at: https://youtu.be/KxcIXNrzu4s?si=Xx1CBxMQ8RLgnSZ0 [Accessed 17 January 2025].