Week 16 - Life Drawing

 Apologies that this is out of order, it looks like I forgot to actually post these. Some of these will have some charcoal smudged on them as I took photos of these when I got home, except for one of them (which you'll see later).

 

Charcoal is really fun for gesture drawing, you can get a lot down quickly with it because it's bigger and a soft material, so it kind of glides over the paper. I still like to use a pencil for smaller details and an underlying structure, but that's more for longer poses when I have more time.

These always look better when I focus less on realism and more on trying to make it look cool, I really love adding dramatic lighting/ shading with the charcoal. I still try and make it match the model/ reference as closely as possible, but using it more as a guide then as something to copy.

The 10 minute poses is when it starts to get really fun - I have time to break out the blending stick and almost render these poses:

I do blend some things quite thoroughly, but I also run the tip of the blending stick along the edges of the charcoal/ big shadows just to soften the edges a little bit - it adds a little bit of detail in a short amount of time

This was the last pose, I love the sword ones, although drawing the sword with charcoal is always difficult - I try to use my whole arm and draw the blade as one solid line rather than doing details/ outlines, but my lines always end up curving a bit too much, and tapering out in the wrong direction. This one was pretty successful though. I added some sort of non-functional lines of action with the charcoal after drawing the main bit to make it look more interesting and to try and imply movement - I also took a photo of this one before going home. Above I did a couple of thumbnail sketches first, they got a bit muddied/smeared with charoal but hopefully you can still see enough of them, it was a bit tricky getting the pose right first.

Sometime around the middle we also did some light studies on black paper, using chalk similar to the way we used charcoal - the lights were off for this, and al we had was the whiteboard behind giving a soft white backlight, so it was a little hard to see. I really enjoyed doing these though, it almost felt like cave painting. I just used my finger to blend some areas, but it looks almost like it's been airbrushed, which is very cool.

I think I added some of these fingerprints on purpose

The piece of chalk I had was really short, so I figured I could use it to block out the silhouette first by using the side of the chalk, instead of the usual constuction lines. I still put some lines in so you can see the direction of the head