Week 15 - Life Drawing

 More life drawing this week, I started off using a pencil, then moved onto a combination of pencil and charcoal:

At the start of first year, with a different lecturer, we had to start off with just 1 minute wireframes, and add the shape and forms on longer poses, studying where the muscles lie. Now, in second year, we can pretty much do what we want in life drawing. This will be partly due to just having more experience/ practice, but as a whole I think my sketches and studies are much looser and more fun to draw, I love doing gestural stuff, especially the more extreme poses.

 

I started trying to apply shading in blocks/ shapes, more like how it was when using charcoal.

 

 

Going back to pencil after using charcoal last time was actually more difficult - you can get away with a lot more with charcoal, although it does sacrifice some detail when drawing at certain sizes.

 

Back to charcoal. I think I said this last time but it's way more fun to use, but also way messier. I think drawing in an actual sketchbook helped as it think it stuck to the paper more, and later I used a blending stick instead of my fingers which made less mess as well, but I still kept accidentally smudging it with my hand every 30 seconds. In secondary school or college they had us use paper scraps to rest our hands on to prevent smudging, but I'm not too bothered about that. Also, the smudges add a bit more detail to the sketches, I think it looks kinda cool.

 

I struggled a bit with pose 2 above, not sure if it was the angle or the pose, for some reason I couldn't wrap my head around the position of the arms relative to the axe, I knew what was happening, but I couldn't get it down onto paper. I started to try and zoom in of the arms, but ran out of time.

 

This pose was really cool. I tried to zoom in on the arm to get some detail/ render it a bit more, but ran out of time again.

 

This (below) was when I started using the blending stick, I've had one for ages but don't remember using it - it was incredibly helpful here, adding depth to the shading and softening the hard edges on the shadows. I do this with pretty much all my drawings, but here you can see the line of action really well. I also started drawing mini lines of action or more extreme curves on the arches of the feet, I think those worked really well in terms of making the feet look less flat. I still put contour lines in where I needed to though, or tried to at least. I also started off with a pencil on all the sketches from here onwards - I'd do the head using the loomis method (Gvaat n.d), then the action line, maybe do some general structure and other details like hands with the pencil, then I'll go in with the charcoal and blending stick.

 

This last one probably should've been landscape, but I stuck with it/ committed to it, the lecturer pointed out that the feet might've been a little off because of it, but I think I did manage to fix it in the end.

 

Reference/s:

 

 

Gvaat, n.d. The Loomis Method of Drawing the Head, a Step-by-Step Guide [online]. Gvaat's Workshop. Available at: https://gvaat.com/blog/how-to-draw-the-head-using-the-loomis-method-a-step-by-step-guide/ [Accessed 03 April 2024].