Life Drawing 10th March 2015

2 Colour line drawing, pen

It's taken me a while to get around to writing this post, partly because I've been very busy and partly because I wasn't really sure what I was going to write. The session went well and it was good to have a few more people there, more people seems to create a more energetic atmosphere I find. As always the model provided some excellent poses and I enjoyed the chance to just sit and draw for a while.

Continuous line, blind drawing

Continuous line, blind drawing

Continuous line, blind drawing

Continuous line, blind drawing

Usually when I come to write up the session I have a fairly clear idea what I'm going to say, I've generally focused on something particular in my drawing or been thinking about certain things that influence my drawing. This time, however, it's not until a couple of weeks afterwards and looking back at the drawings that I can see what the sessions drawings were about.

Continuous line

Continuous line

Continuous line

Continuous line

It's a busy time for me at the moment and I think that's reflected in my drawing, there's a lot of quick, quite rough drawings and very few more considered drawings as my brain is going in lots of different directions at once and I find it harder to stop and really focus on one thing. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, I enjoyed doing some 'blind' drawing where I don't look at the page and try to capture the pose in a single line, I like how these drawings capture a sense of the pose even when they don't bear much actual resemblance and the proportions are almost always way out. There is a certain freedom to working in this way that I find very helpful, not worrying about the accuracy of the outcome frees the eye and the hand to draw what's there rather than trying to make it look 'right.' In all my drawings this session I think I was looking to pare things down and reduce the number of lines used to try and capture the essence of the pose (that sounds very pretentious but I can't think of a better way to explain it!)

Continuous line

Continuous line

Continuous line

Continuous line

One of the things I did try and focus on a bit more was drawing faces. This is definitely my weakest area so I usually avoid it but I'd like to get better and the only way to do that is to practice. I always find when drawing this model that I think of statues and rock, he is very solid and I want to capture that in my drawing. As a consequence the faces I've drawn are very lined, making him  look a lot older than in real life!

Continuous line

Studies, pen