Life Drawing, - General Practice on the Language of Drawing

A slightly longer series of 15 - 20 minute poses today to warm up the drawing muscles...

 Quick sketches using black marker pen on newsprint paper

 Slightly longer poses seemed to produce better results.


I'm still foreshortening the dimensions a little too much, I wonder if it's my height ratio to the model? - I'm 6'4", whereas the model is perhaps 5'3 / 5'4?

A very basic full - on drawing was made to test the theory that my sighting (being above the model) is causing too much foreshortening in the legs...

This drawing was conducted whilst seated on a drawing stool, lowering my eye level to that of the model. It appears to have corrected the proportion issues....











Some of the exercises in "Drawing Projects; An exploration of  the language of Drawing", (2011), Maslin, M. and Southern, J., London, Black Dog Publishing, were considered suitable themes to investigate in future drawing sessions.  I have purchased this excellent book for myself and will work through the exemplars through the coming months in my own time...
http://blackdogonline.com/art/drawing-projects.html

Life Drawing - General Practice

I spent a few hours on Sunday drawing a portrait of a girl that I had started and worked on some time ago.

Glad I picked it up again to finish the sketch of course, but this earlier practice seemed to put me in a negative area when I picked up a graphite stick today.

The start-up session today consisted of the usual four 2-3 minute poses, and I chose to use a charcoal stick for all this work.  The top first and second warm-up sketches were quite poor, lacking in critical structure and so proportionately they are just wrong.

The lower third and fourth attempts began to improve, though...

A more abstract set of dynamic poses were next, the figure on the far left seemed to be well created, but I didn't seem to have my eye in!

Not happy with this at all.  I seemed to loose the construction of the drawing and this flat and boney attempt was a disaster, in my opinion, my next effort was no better and I soon ran out of time!

Conclusions;

I wasn't too happy with the results of the longer poses as they seemed to have lost all the good progress I made at the weekend.  I wondered what I'm doing wrong? - Maybe thinking too much about the finished form perhaps and not creating the underlying scaffolding perhaps? I don't know, but I think I took a step backwards in my lesson today...