Life Drawing 5

  1 Minute Warmup Sketches -

This week's life drawing session we focused on material and folds on the human figure, the model came in wearing a quite loose fitting dress along with a scarf so that we could study the folds of the fabric. For our 1 minute sketches i focused only on the visible folds in the fabric, sketching them out and then refining the human form a little more afterwards. I feel like this worked somewhat well and i especially like the first sketch on the first image, the first sketch on the second image, and the second sketch on the third image. I think i captured the poses best in these sketches and i like how interesting the folds were, it was fairly easy to identify the pinch points on these poses too. Not having to focus on the full figure was also much less stressful in only 1 minute.

3 Minute Sketches -

Moving onto the 3 minute sketches i found some of these quite challenging, having the most trouble with the reclined/lying down poses. As stated before this is something i have a lot of trouble with but i have noticed that by sketching out the form based on the negative space as opposed to working on top of a scaffold is much easier. I do really like the first sketch on the second image however, I don't think the foreshortening on the leg is too bad and the folds in the dress over the legs look quite close to the model. I also quite like the hand on the last one, of these sketches however i think the first one is my weakest and you can see i had some trouble planning out the sketch as a whole with the fact i had to do a thumbnail in the bottom right corner of the page. The position of the legs was really giving me some trouble and whilst i did try my best i ran out of time to really make any accurate changes. To work on this in the future i would probably look at where the hips should be to ensure the torso isn't too short.

10 Minute Sketches -

For the 10 minute sketches i had a bit of trouble in the last two images, I think i started out fairly ok and i am very happy with the face. I used the technique of looking at negative space and blocking in shadows for the face instead of plotting out where features should be using the Loomis method. Whilst i do really like the Loomis method i think because we have so little time for these sketches it isn't the most efficient technique to use. I got sort of shaken by the first one and so i was focusing too hard on the details on the second sketch and i think making so many alterations and not sticking with anything meant that i had much less detail in the end. And for the final one i was really struggling to identify the overall shape of the pose so i thought blocking it in with marker then drawing over the top would help [sometimes i do this digitally, blocking in a rough shape then adding in details overtop] however i quickly found out what i thought was going to be a helpful technique really wasn't working and so i decided it best just to leave this piece as it was and just call it a learning experience.

15 Minute sketches -

The final sketch is by far my favourite of all of the drawings this session, I really like the t shirt fold on the right arm and how i segmented the folds of the scarf over the left arm, i also really like how i drew the model's face in this one. some things i noticed i didn't get quite right is that i made her torso a little short, in future i will make sure just to take a little extra time to check the proportions of my model, perhaps even using the pencil technique to judge the distance between elements. I did a bit of shading on the drawing too but didn't want to go too far with it as i was already pretty happy with the sketch. As i had a bit of time left, i decided to draw the person sitting next to me too. Overall i found this life drawing session very beneficial and i enjoyed looking at how folds and fabrics drape over the body as this is something i have wanted to improve on.