I'm trying to think

Life Drawing - Week 3

We got a man this time - quite literally a hairy arsed bloke with muscle tone and straight lines interupted by a pot belly. That was the first challenge - making him look like a man. The first few sketches produced soft womanly shaped transexuals made of curves and smooth lines until eventually I got the angles and the sharp points and it started to take shape.

This week was all about tone - light and dark, images built from light, figures emerging through contrast. It was tough, having only just learnt to draw a basic figure and now being asked to build an image from light and dark. But once it clicked, it really clicked and the absence of line really freed me up to put an image of this man on the page. So much so, I forgot about any background and instead of lying down, he now looks like he's floating - but you can't have everything can you?

Life Drawing - Week 2

It's a week late going up, but I've been putting together my first big client presentation at my new agency GT (which has a spangly new website.)

Week 2 was about building images, rather than line making, with small simple marks, rather than continuous lines. We were encouraged to dot around, make a mark where we saw a significant point, then move on - rather than get hung up and draw what we thought was there. So we were building images rather than drawing people. I'm sure there's a wider lesson here, but I likened it to writing - working on a sentence at a time, a word at a time until the whole thing comes together to make something worth reading.

The first image is another two minute sketch. The second is a longer pose and my first attempt at foreshortening. For the lesson this was a great pose because I was forced to draw what was there - a giant hand in the foreground, a tiny body as it disappeared into the distance and this strange foot hanging there on the horizon.

Life Drawing - Week 1

I've started life drawing with Eli on Saturday afternoons. It's something I've been meaning to do for some time as a complement to my core skill set as a copywriter, but my memories of art lessons are dominated by grumpy beardy art teachers drilling every ounce of enthusiasm and originality out of me and the rest of the class. I dropped art at 14. There is also a part of me that avoids trying things I suspect I won't be good at more or less straightaway - I had to overcome that. The teacher Andy is really cool and got straight in there - my drawing changed dramatically within the first two hour class. Hopefully, as the 10 week course goes by, you can witness some progress in the category 'Life Drawing'.

The first blue drawing is a 2 minute sketch using an old brush. The second is a 20 minute pencil sketch (I've cut the head off because I really can't do faces yet, so it looks much better without it.)