Life Drawing Day

On Saturday 12th June I went to a life drawing day in Wisbech with my 2 OCA friends, Paul and Rachel.  Rachel lives in Wisbech and goes to regular life drawing classes which this was an extension of.  I'd never done any life drawing before and this was a great experience - just lovely to sit and draw and paint all day!

Here are some of my efforts....

We started with some quick 5 minute sketches - I like doing these as I enjoy working quickly.  I also think that when you make mistakes or you aren't so happy with the results you feel more comfortable with yourself knowing you only had five minutes to do it in!

These 2 were my favourites - both in charcoal, felt I got a good grasp of the body shape and use of tone.

We then went on to some longer poses.  Originally she planned to pose for an hour or more for a couple of them but the room was freezing cold so she only did up to 30 minutes.  I was happy with this as would have struggled to fill an hour with one picture.  In fact osme of the 30 minute poses I broke down in to 2 or more pics.

I had watched a video on the OCA website about starting a life drawing with shapes - squares, triangles, sausages etc so decided to try this method out.  I think it worked well as my best proportioned piece but perhaps not my favourite as slightly stiffer and more formal than the others.  I do think it would be useful though if doing preparatory sketches or if working for a longer time.

I then tried some pen drawings as my favourite medium.  Maybe because you can't make any changes and it is pretty unforgiving so you just have to get on with it

Here are 3 diff pics of the same pose.  I found this really tricky to work with as it looked very unnatural to me.

The last one is a pen drawing with an acrylic wash over the top.  I like using the 'wrong' colour in a monochrome as it forces me to think about the tones - dark and light rather than in colours.

I liked this effect so did some more.

I hope to join another class soon.  Some friends at work have talked about the possibility of joining together and hiring a model ourselves which would be great - must remind them and see if we can do it soon.