[Drawing] Easely pun

Today we didn't have a life model in, so we brave second years volunteered ourselves to take up the task. I earned a new level of respect for the brave souls that do this as a living, because even a short 3 minute pose could become an eternity of achy arms and legs if you didn't distribute your weight correctly.

Oh! We also did some drawing or something!

This week we were blessed with easels. Part of me wishes they were called hardels. It's surprising how much of a difference having your paper upright can make. The first handful of drawings were a half and half mix of getting my wrist in the right position and actually putting the marks down. After some suggestion from the teacher, I moved my easel from the same side as my drawing arm to the opposite. This helped my wrist out a lot and also came me more freedom to move my arm for certain lines.

Onto the actual drawing, we started the session with the usual warm up activities, some one minute poses using silhouette and scribble techniques we explored in previous lessons. These warmups are good to get used to spacial awareness on the page again. Seeing as the silhouette is one continuous line, it starts to get you thinking, rather than mindlessly drawing something and then correcting it.

The rest of the lesson was spent taking it in turns to do 3 poses. Each pose lasted 3:20 to add up to around 10 minutes with pose change time included. In this time, we were told to draw a scribbly silhouette to get the form idea down, followed by a basic stick man to get the gesture lines, then finally a drawing of the full pose. For the entirety of today's lesson I chose to work in pen rather than my usual pencil, so that any mistakes I made would show through, rather than me hiding them. This was good practice for me as I could see just what I did wrong and right in the final picture and take these into consideration. I also found myself measuring proportions with my pen this lesson, which is a technique I very rarely use. This really helped me to get the anatomy correct by measuring the head in relation to the rest of the body. The pictures I'm most proud of are the pictures of Arron (bottom picture, top right).

All in all, I feel today went well, and the purpose of our exercise was very clear and worked out.

The poses still got achy though.