Life Drawing - Lighting

1 min, 5 min

 20 min

 30 min

Life Drawing - Adding Colour

5 min

 10 min

 30 min

I introduced warm and cool tones to this illustration, which I believe to be very effective in visually suggesting the shape of the life model. It also makes for a very interesting final result.

Life Drawing - Hand Study

For this session I decided to do some hand studies, as I have been under performing in this area. Fine liner was used because I wanted to try out some hatching techniques and I like the imagery that this method of illustration produces.

Starting out I was using a hand construction technique, using arcs as a guide for finger lengths. After completing a couple of one minute poses I tried without the construction lines. What resulted was a much more clean illustration but the fingers turned out much thicker than intended, with more practice I could remedy this.

 This sketch is from one of the longer poses that the model did. It is a much lager illustration than the rest and with the time I had I was able to include more detail. I was going to add some shading to this but ran out of time with the pose.

Another one of the longer poses. For this I managed to practice some hatch work and overall I believe it to be very effective. I probably could improve this by adding more contrast between shadow and highlight areas. 

Life Drawing - Proportion in Graphite

We started the session with a few one minute poses. With this in mind I drew out a shoulder hip and foot line, with a guide for seven and a half heads at the side. The average human is seven and a half heads tall with the proportions of the top half of the body nearly equal to the length of the legs.

Obviously with some of the poses the model was leaning over, I had to take this into account when sketching out the pose. I find that it helps to build the form from a series of shapes, if this is sketched lightly then a more realistic sketch can be built up over the top of this. Bearing in mind that we only had one minute to sketch each pose I think that my illustrations are fairly successful.

My first sketch as seen here was a little bit stiff and lacked life. As I continued with the other poses, I tried to compensate for this by using curves in the building shapes.

With the five minute poses I began to struggle once the basic pose was down on the page, as I am not a competent illustrator. Shadows and highlights seemed to allude me and I did not know where to start with shading techniques. Despite this I managed to improve on the line sketches as each pose presented its self, giving more flow to the sketched form.

We were given longer poses during the session, the one displayed here was thirty minutes. I have included this in my examples as it was one of my better sketches from the session. The shading displayed is minimal at best but I was beginning to understand how shadow and light effected the form, pushing these areas with loose pencil marks and smudging them with a finger for softening.