165: Mark McDonnell Gesture Warm Ups

I figure this blog shouldn't always be about me posting my work, but as well about artists out there who inspire. Mark McDonnell is one of those artists. I am not at a stage yet where I can do the things he does, but I really wish I could. I am comfortable now with proportions, and even getting realistic drawings from the model on paper, that's why I have been experimenting with color lately, but my real ambition now is to push the poses and look for the storyelements.

Look at Mark's warm ups, absolutely amazing!

164: Life Drawing Dawson Street Dublin

Last drawing session of the year :'( Continuing in the same spirit of last week, it's much less about good figure drawing than it is about experimenting with different media! I packed some acrylics along but in the end worked mostly with pastels, only difference is I brought in colored paper!


 The warm up drawings (10 x 1 minute)

all biro on colored paper

30 minutes sketch with biro and colored with pastels

Greyscale version to see tonal values (Photoshop edit)

20 mins drawing straight with pastel, no underdrawing

Base with acrylics and pastels on top 25 mins

At the end we share sketchbooks, this is the first time I took pictures but I figured it would be nice to share some images of our session in Dublin :)

163: Life Drawing Sol Art Dublin

Since this was my second session this week, I decided to be loose and adventurous! I stayed away form pencil and instead I used oil pastels, soft pastels, biro and colourpencil in there somewhere :P

Warm up drawings :

1 min Oil Pastels

1 min oil pastels

1 min Oil Pastels

Pencil on dirty page next to the drawing below 

because I had a few more mins to kill.

This was the last pose 25 mins

Oil pastels, soft pastels, color pencil, putty rubber.

15 mins Oil Pastel on top of Soft Pastel

15-20 mins biro

10 mins Biro

15 mins Soft Pastel with Oil pastels

162: Life Drawing Sol Art Dublin

Another week, another life drawing session! This session I went into drawing with a different mindset, I really wanted to look for simpler confident strokes in my quick poses and even though at the time I didn't feel like it clicked, when I look back at the drawings I think it did. As always starting off with 1 minute warmups:

Pencil & Charcoal 1 min

Charcoal 1 min

All sketches below are done with a 2B Pencil
1 min

I tried to apply the Reilly technique to save a poor drawing :P
10 mins

The drawing below was an experiment where I built up the form from the centre.
I didn't draw any outlines, didn't do any planning. Just built up volume with shading.

25 mins pencil

Wasted a lot of time on the last drawing so didn't get much work done on it

2B pencil 25 mins

161: Reilly's quicksketch Method

I stumbled across this interesting guy who posted up a tutorial on Reilly's method. I never heard of this, but it's pretty awesome! Will try it out and post up the results here!

This is the youtube tutorial:

More on this website: http://www.freshdesigner.com/tag/reilly-method/

160: Life Drawing in Dublin

Another week, another life drawing session. I'm glad to say that this is now part of my life, and will be until I get bored with drawing, which I suspect and hope will be NEVER! :)

This session consists of 10 x 1 minute poses, followed by 1 pose over 3x 30 mins.

This drawing took me 2x30 mins (2B pencil on A3)

These are the 1 minute warm up drawings.
Started with color pencils and switched to graffite.

These are the experimental drawings of the same long pose:

159: Dana Linn Bailey Sketches

Started the day with some drawings of Dana Linn Bailey which I discovered through a friend of mine who is doing bodybuilding. Quite an amazing video that really demanded some sketching! It's awesome to see all those muscles, yet her routine was very sexy at the same time! I linked the video below:

I then jumped into some posemaniacs, 30 seconds drawings and filled up an entire sheet:

And finally drew some more old men, because I love old people :)

158: Life Drawing Dublin

Today I went to a different pace for life drawing where they had proper lights set up. The guy did a demo of drawing form dark to light. The whole page is greyed out with charcoal and you then basically draw the light source with your eraser. Interesting technique so I had to try it, I don't really like the drawing but I love the texture. It's almost as interesting as a painting! So I took some close ups to show of the texture!

Warm up sketch:

 First 30 minute pose (graffite pencil)

Detail (charcoal)

Detail 2 (Charcoal)

157: Gesture practice

It's been a while since I've done digital drawings, but here ya go. I did them using the references and timer on: http://artists.pixelovely.com/practice-tools/figure-drawing:

156: Life Drawing at Sol Art in Dublin

Alright Sketchers!

Today my ambitions were different. I felt I did good with my last two sessions using pencil, so I wanted to get out of my comfort zone and use different media. I used soft Pastel chalks for my 1 minute poses, tried it on longer poses aswell but there's not enough control to really work a drawing with that medium in my opinion.

I then used a normal biro to do some drawings which ended up ok I guess...one drawing is done my pencil and it was so easy. Definitely a medium I am now comfortable with. My last drawing was with a bro, and I love the rendering I did but the proportions were messed up, so I didn't even bother scanning it on :P

(1 minute)

(15 minutes)

(15 minutes)

(20 minutes)

(10 minutes)
Inspired by newcomer Joao, I stole his idea to draw
the sketcher since the pose was kind of boring...

More 1 minute drawings: