Life Drawing From Last Night
Below are some of my favourite 1 and 10-minute drawings from life drawing last night.
Schoolism - Gesture Drawing Week 2
This week we covered shapes where the goal was distillation or breaking things down to their essential forms. One of the assignments was to first sketch/paint out the basic shape for each pose from the provided video with each pose timed for 30 seconds. I used to think that 1‑minute poses were short but when each pose is such a short duration you find you have no choice but to get down to the bare essentials and quickly. We were to through the video again, quickly sketching out each pose but this time using the shapes we drew as a guide. Exaggeration or pushing the pose was encouraged; it's something I need to improve upon. This was a challenging exercise and really made me see things in a different way.
In the next exercise we had to find basic shapes using either 10 paintings or photos. I decided to use the same paintings and movies I posted from the previous week and, in some cases, I reconsidered some of my main lines of action.
For the last exercise, we were asked to do 2 hours of café sketching. Because I've been asked to work on a comic involving a cat as the main character, I decided to kill two birds with one stone and instead do cat sketching. I have to say that 30 seconds now seems like a luxury when trying to draw a very active pet.
My next post will be a little late because I'm taking some time off for the Toronto International Film Festival. 😁
Life Drawing - April 13, 2015
Below is my best work from life drawing at Kagan's yesterday. It took me quite some time to get into the groove but that tends to happen when I've stayed away from life drawing for a while. For me, life drawing requires a different mind set than when drawing from a photo reference or my imagination so after a long comic project I need to build up those muscles up again! Speaking of...I should probably get back to the gym as well. :)
Life Drawing - October 2014 and March 30 2015
It's been around 6 months since I had time to get out to do any life drawing. Home projects and a comic deadline kept me quite busy but now that my projects are all wrapped up, I thought it was time that I got back to it.
As expected, I felt quite rusty after such a long break. During life drawing with timed intervals, I feel like I'm back at school writing a test with a buzzer threatening to go off. I've attached a couple of drawings from the Halloween session at Kagan's (10 and 15 minute sketches) and two pages from this past Monday's session (1 minute and 10 minutes). I definitely need more practice and practice makes perfect, right? Haha.
Life drawing at the TCW
I'm making an effort to go life drawing again as it's one of the things I regret not spending enough time doing. I know it's a good exercise to keep up with as it trains you to solve problems quickly and, in turn, helps to increase the speed with which you draw. I find life drawing is a lot like working out. The more you do it the better the results. And like working out, it's hard to get past those first few times. My first session was no less discouraging as my drawing of the pretty lady turned out looking more like something that was dragged from the pit so I'll spare you the posting of that. Instead, I've posted something from my most recent open life drawing session at the Toronto Cartoonists Workshop.
They had a costume for the latter half of the session which I think added an element of fun plus it's good to practice drawing drapery. I've taken one of the poses and started to add colour and play around with it a bit. I'm not sure where it will go but sometimes it's just about the journey.
This Little Piggy Went To Market...
Feet are one of the top problem areas for me, so I decided to tackle them head-on by drawing a lot of well...feet. I decided to start from the inside out but aside from the model skull I own, I don't yet have an actual skeleton on hand to help me gain a better understanding of what I'm drawing. In the meanwhile, I've used the following references to aid me: Artistic Anatomy by Dr. Paul Richer, Figure Drawing - Design and Invention by Michael Hampton and Anatomy for the Artist by Sarah Simblet - all excellent books. Some of the studies are copies from these sources while the rest use my feet or photographs of feet as reference. There's something about copying something over and over again that commits it to memory - I now know the names of all the bones in the feet!
I have also included some more of my life drawings (5-10 minute poses).
