LIFE DRAWING: Fountain Pen

Fountain Pen did not work well for me, it also wasn't helped that for some stupid reason I drew on A2 sheets of paper.

1) Larger drawings means more time to wasted drawing a line.
2) It's more difficult to keep proportions since I'm not using an easel, so there's a lot of distortion on an A2 board on your lap.
3) Scanning A2 sheets on a A4 scanner....myeah!

On the upside, those "bad" sessions always really motivate me to draw more, so thinking of jumping in on a saturday session to make up for some lost mileage last month. Anyway here are todays' drawings (or at least most of them, because of the A2 size I left out the really crappy ones.

What's a bad drawing?
I also just want to clarify what I consider to be a "bad" drawing. This is purely personal to me own drawing experience, I never look at anybody else's work with the same expectations, usually I look for things that work well in other people's work (things that I can steal :D).

Any drawing that is out of proportion for me is bad, because it's something I just really wanted to focus on. Any drawing where more than 40% of my time is spent on a face is bad. Especially if that comes at the cost of having a poor gesture or unfinished body parts. Basically drawings where I do the same stupid thing I've done a million times before :P

1 minute gestures:

I really should've warmed up with that pen before doing some gestures. It's just a shame to struggle with a medium while you want to focus on getting the power of the gestures in front of you....those drawings remind of when I started drawing in Flash, very scratchy...

So..I caved in and snuck in a few pencil gestures (1 min)

Longer poses

Went back to the inkpen for some longer poses (10 mins), I just worked my way down the body from the head, it's not a gestural approach but for those who like to carve out some shapes it's pretty cool..(that face wasn't scanned in...so here's an awkward crop)

I also don't like that drawing below, the reason is that there are too many lines with no purpose, especially that lower back. So while I didn't like the fountain pen, I think I'll come back to it because it'll force me to be very considerate about the lines I put down.

Below is an example of spending waaay too much time on the head and then having no time for the rest of the body

Aaaah...to finish up some good ol' willow charcoal, when things got rough I just got a quick one in with that medium, just feels really loose and natural to work with.