Drawing Human form in different ways 21st November

Human form in different ways   21st November

With this Friday being the last lesson on life drawing I was hoping to increase my speed so I could complete a couple more pieces.

The lesson started with a quick 5 minute study. This was a good way to warm up as well as getting used to drawing quickly; something I need to improve on. For the first three poses we were told to get as much of the form down as we could. For the last few poses we only had to draw a stick man made up of five lines, one each for the body, arms, legs and a circle for the head.

We were then told to turn our board around to the side of us so that we could draw on it, but not see what we were drawing. Using a piece of charcoal, we had to draw the model making sure not to look at our drawing, or taking the charcoal off the paper. The results were very interesting; mostly mad scribble, but they did have some figure shape. Finally, on the same page, again not taking our charcoal off the board, we had to draw just the outline of the model, but this time with the opposite hand. It was an interesting exercise that made you concentrate on what you were drawing.

We then moved onto a larger drawing where we covered the paper with black charcoal, then used the rubber to add light by erasing the dark. As I have done this a couple of times during the course, I'm starting to get accustomed to drawing this way. Using the rubber to lightly draw the lines and to map out the figure, I then started to pick out the lightest parts and gradually add and blend in tone. We were then given white charcoal to make one part of the drawing more detailed. We were told this is how the old Masters worked and that the drawings they did were just a part of the painting process. I chose to draw the model's arm and shoulder as they were in the light and had more tone.

Finally we were given a different way to start a drawing; instead of measuring we had to draw lines and angles that would form the figure we were drawing. This looked almost like construction lines in a building. It was a very different way of drawing from last week, but having got used to measuring angles, it wasn't too hard. After the lines were drawn we could then go over them with a bit of colour to sketch out more of the curves of the figure. It was an interesting lesson and gave me some different ways of looking at the human form.