Life drawing

9TH SESSION – 16/11

After last weeks focus on heads, hands and feet, we returned to full figure drawing, but with a significant change in the models posture, to fully reclining on the floor as opposed to sitting or standing, which up until this point had been the only variety of basic poses we had been using. The change in posture provided us with new challenges in approaching the figure, as a lot of the standard rules about interpreting the figure were no longer 'true' as such. Measurement and awareness of bone structure became particularly important.

We began the session with four short warmup sketches in different styles and media; a fast gestural sketch with straight lines, a continuous line drawing followed by another, but with our other hand, and finally an unusual but very interesting method, which involved standing alongside the easel in such a way that we could not see our drawing, and we could only see the model, effectively drawing 'blind' in a sense. This produced some very interesting results. Though it was not specified that it be another continuous line drawing, I found that due to the nature of working without vision on the piece, the only way to judge where I was on the paper was to not remove my hand from it, akin to feeling along a wall in the dark when searching for a lightswitch.

I found that the added difficulty resulted in it taking considerably longer to have the basic geometry and lines of the drawing in correct proportions and in the right positions, leading me to unfortunately neglect the details of the head and hands on both main works, due to time constraints. I observed that I was not the only person with this issue, as several people noted during the critical discussion at the end of the session that they could have continued on drawing for considerably longer still. Another issue I found that was not so much caused by the reclining position but definitely aggravated was that due to the added challenge of interpreting the figure in that position, proportions expaned and contracted multiple times during the basic geometry stage of the second drawing and this resulted in the top of the head and the majority of the feet being left off the page. Although I do feel my scaling of my drawings is definitely improving, it clearly still needs more work.

 Due to the issue with the time constraints, i found that I had to rush to apply tone to both drawings, but because I consciously decided to change from correcting the line aspect of the drawing to tone, I gave myself adequate time to complete this part of the drawing, though not enough time to refine it necessarily. As a result, though, I am actually quite satisfied with the tonal work on these drawings, as they are more 'complete' than they have often been in the past, again due to running out of time and not effectively managing the time given to us.

Four warmup sketches; gestural sketch, continuous line drawings and the 'blind' drawing, the most interesting of them all.

Drawing 1; proportionally good, facial details are left out largely due to the unexpected difficulties in drawing the face from such a peculiar angle. I tried to apply the typical rules of measurement and also placement as learned last week, but kept failing, so due to the lack of time I chose to apply general tone and complete the tone for the rest of the figure. I am pleased with the tonal work here.

Drawing 2: Proportionally more awkward, the geometry kept having to be drastically altered several times, and in the end the overall figure was longer than I had accounted for, leading to cut-off at either end of the figure. The tonal work is satisfactory but I feel that the legs were not really corrected still during the geometry stage, and like before I sacrificed this to some degree in order to get complete tonal coverage, which imrpoves the image overall as a result.