Life drawing - the final sketches

 These are the final life drawings I did towards the end of our term of life drawing. I think many of these are my strongest pieces as they show where my style is now that I have had time to develop certain techniques and find out what works for me and what doesn't.

I really like this piece however I had the same problem of the head being too small, other than that I love the definition and the shading. Charcoal is definitely a medium I love working with and one of my strengths when it comes to sketching.

The body is totally out of proportion in this drawing but it's almost like some kind of crazy perspective abstraction, so fits in nicely with moving to look at abstraction of the human form.

This is another finger painting piece which I really like as it's messy but refined. The torso is slightly out of proportion which is a problem I seem to keep having! This is probably something I should work on in my own time, however, getting someone who's up for modelling nude for you is not exactly easy!

I was being way too perfectionist on this drawing as I didn't get to finish it! However it looks pretty good so would've been a pretty good piece if I had finished it.

The following drawings were drawn using a piece of charcoal on the end of a stick, so we were drawing from a distance. The top one I went over and added detail with charcoal.

 These pieces were done in the Matise style

Life drawing - the middle stages of my development

As you can see, I'm starting to get into my own kind of technique with the life drawing now, using charcoal and being fairly messy with it, yet refined. I also started to focus on certain aspects of the body, mainly the torso. I found that I tended to start by drawing the head but I would then draw the body in a slightly bigger scale to the head that I had started off with!

We then went on to use white paint on black paper and paint with our fingers. I quite liked this technique as it's very messy and, it sounds cheesy, but I almost feel more engaged in the artwork because I'm using my hands rather than a pencil or charcoal. I do like the technique a lot, however the result is possibly a little too messy for my liking, not quite refined enough.

(below) this one is probably my favourite out of the finger painting pieces.

The drawings below are chalk on black paper, where we had to focus on drawing the light areas, using the black paper as the darkness. I quite like these drawings too as they are quite similar to the charcoal ones I did. This is a good technique to use and I enjoyed using it.

(below) I especially like this piece!

Painting with yellow, red and blue! We had to use blue for the dark areas, yellow for the light areas and red for the medium tones. I didn't use much red, as I just preferred to blend the yellow and blue, making the medium toned areas a green-ish colour. I used a small paintbrush and I quite like these pieces too!

(below) In this piece I combined finger painting and the colour / tone technique. I really like this a\s it's more refined than the white paint finger painting technique and the colour brings the piece to life.

I then returned to using a brush again, still avoiding using red... I have no idea why!

This is a drawing I did using an app on my iPhone called SketchbookX. My phone is relatively small so it was hard to draw on with my thumb and fingers!

This is a quick sketch of a guy in McDonalds done using the same app. The definition is pretty good if you consider the scale of my iPhone!

Life drawing - starting off

This is one 3rd of my life drawing from the start of the life drawing term to the end. You can really see how my techniques have developed and how, at least I think, I've improved at drawing!

These images below aren't great but they are the first life drawings I've ever done! The proportion isn't quite right and I didn't manage to finish them as I was trying to take my time and get the body as accurate as possible.

I think this one (below) is pretty decent for a first attempt. If I remember correctly, we had about 10 minutes on each pose to start with.

I quite like this one (below) but the head might be a little on the small side

(below) We had to draw without looking at our paper, looking at only the model... so this is what I came out with!

We got shorter timings for these drawings, getting down from 5 minutes to 1 second! This was to speed up our drawing speeds and get as much detail down in a short time as we could.

(below) I elongated the body a little too much in these drawings, but I was working a lot faster and getting the majority of the body drawn!

So overall, these drawings were not bad but not great either, and I've since proved that I can do a lot better! Check out my next two posts for the rest of my life drawings (the better ones!)