LIFE DRAWING: Sol Art Gallery - CHARCOAL

This week I picked up some charcoal sticks, not the same as the willow charcoal I used previously. This seems to stick to the page better, it  leaves a lot of pigment and texture on your page though. I also used a rotring pen for the occasional drawing. This was the last life drawing session of the year :(

1 min poses:

5 mins and longer:

You can see I struggled finding a rhythm with longer poses, so I did several drawings of the same pose trying something different each time:

When I drew this pose again (below), I added some interest by tilting her head away also adding more asymmetry in her body.

I actually drew the pose below as you see it, I wanted to push the perspective depth and used the model more as a reference rather then copying exactly what I saw before me.

Also did a loose charcoal sketch on an A3 page of her head.

Below was another attempt at the pose, I really liked the line quality but proportionally it's all over the shop :D

pencil & rorting pen (below) : using line to describe form is an art in it's own right. Here are two examples on how 'not' to do it.

And lastly a bit of smudge action on a 10 minute pose:

Eye studies + 30 sec gestures

Loosen up those wrists with a few quick gestures using posemaniacs (30 seconds)

I might dig into some studies again for a bit, want to work on heads, especially the eyes and nose. I took some notes from Proko's eye tutorial:

And some studies from the Hogarth book..of course studies are useless unless you apply them to studies of reality...might do that tomorrow.

Cafe Sketches + Gestures

Sketches done in Easons with a coffee.

30 second gestures in PS:

Couple of gesture studies of cats on youtube, quality is generally pretty bad though, so stopped and will look for some good reference. This is in preparation for a cat walkcycle.

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.

Ink Sketches

I have sacrificed my usual figure sketching for animating, but it's definitely a habit I don't want to drop. I'll be going life drawing tomorrow and I wanted to use a different medium. I will use a fountain pen with black Quink, so instead of having a potentially horrible experience messing with a medium I never use, I opted to do some warm ups this evening to get at least a bit familiar with it.

It's definitely very tricky for me, I've got to be more carefull about the lines I put down, and I fear that especially on 2+ min poses, this will be a disaster :P On the up side, I feel that I can really boost up my skills using this, so I might be focussing on this for the rest of the year.

I also wanted to share this line by Michelangelo..the artist, not the Ninja Turtle.

"An artist must have his measuring tools not in the hand, but in the eye." (Michelangelo)

I haven't measured while drawing for...years...I have drawn a hell of a lot of disproportionate figures, but after all that failure I have seen the impact in my work from imagination. It's also the reason I am embracing this new medium, it's just about finding out what doesn't work..and once you get comfortable, abandon it all again and find something new :D

LIFE DRAWING: Sol Art Gallery - Pencils

It's been too long, totally didn't have a sense of time today, so lots of incomplete drawings.

1 minute gestures:

Some incomplete drawings ranging from 5 to 10 minutes:

Last pose I messed around first and then I ran out of time with the final one

Hand Studies

Some hand studies in preparation for a small project.