Lesson one: Life Drawing Intro

Monday mornings have been scheduled for a relaxing two and a half hour session of life drawing, and today was the first one.

 

To begin with, one of the things we were asked was why do we draw? At first we came up with what we thought were the obvious answers; To increase creativity? To improve our observational skills? Because it's fun and enjoyable? These were all of course valid answers but it seemed we were slightly missing the point.

 

We draw because its part of a humans development. As a small child, drawing is one of the first things you learn to do on picking up a pencil. Commonly with most children the pencil is held in a fist position, but what eventually develops as you grow up is movement between your index finger and your thumb, otherwise known as the pincer movement. This is the movement that allows you to pick up a pencil to write and draw.

 

However, once this skill has been mastered we learn that this is not the only way to hold a pencil when drawing. In fact the pencil can be held in a number of ways to create different textures and marks along the page. Here's an obvious example. By holding the pencil up right, the very tip is the only part in contact with the paper and so making a thin line. In contrast, by holding the pencil more on its side and using the edge of the pencil lead, you will create a thicker line and a more grainy texture.

 

Here are some 5 minute sketches I did to begin with.

 

 

  

Here we were told to produce some quick three minute sketches and to concentrate particularly on form and not detail. The model held a drape of fabric as prop.

 

Three minutes go in no time at all so I really had to focus on what was important e.g. position of limbs, on which leg she had her weight on as that determines a lot about the pose etc.

 



For some of the poses I would draw a line here and there to give the impression of a leg or an arm as there was no time to draw the whole thing! You can see an example of this on the centre figure below.

 

This is a ten to fifteen minute drawing with out looking at the paper (as you can probably tell..)

The purpose of this exercise was to really study and observe the body shape of the model. Some times when doing observational drawing we spend more time actually looking at the paper drawing than observing the object. The result of this is producing a drawing of what we think we see and not what we really see. Its all about hand eye coordination which is what this exercise encouraged us to focus on.

 

So without looking at the paper, we had to trace the body shape of the model slowly with our eyes and at the same time move the pencil along the paper. It was quite hard to not look at the paper. I admit to looking a few times, and yet this was still my outcome, a page of scribbles! However, there is still some sort of human form that can seen amongst the lines, so in that sense I feel I succeeded in this exercise! The point was not to produce a perfectly proportioned drawing of the model, but to practice the observational/ hand eye coordination skill.