Week 04 - Life Drawing - Experimenting with Media

This life drawing session was possibly my favourite one so far.

We began, as usual, with five 3 minute poses. This model had a very irregular body so at the beginning it was very hard to draw.

Next the model walked slowly around the room for about 10 minutes and we had to draw five very quick poses, in a sort of animated freeze frame. This was very weird to do as you sort of had to keep the image in mind as he would have already moved into the next step. I was trying to draw too quickly at first so I ended up with a very cartoon style. We then went around and added any comments on other's work.

This is the part I really enjoyed doing. We were asked to choose three different media's not including charcoal. We then spent 15 minutes on a pose using each of these materials. I chose ink first and though I don't often paint or use paintbrushes, I found this very comfortable and the watered down ink was a good way to add shading.

 My second choice was pencil. As I was drawing a large drawing and the pencil was very small, the drawing looks very small and empty. I usually add lots of details with pencils so it was strange trying to draw roughly and quickly. I think adding some crosshatching would have looked good so if I do this again I might try add some.

Last was the media I enjoyed most, though ink was close too. I used a simple red biro. The pa flowed nicely and I had control over the darkness and thickness of the line which helped me be able to sketch out the position first. The pose was also interesting to draw as the angle made everything flow nicely.

The fact that I was near the end of the model meant I had a lot of perspective to draw. I think most of it worked out fine and it was nice to finally have the time to actually draw the hand.

Lastly we started another pose with the last media we used. We then went around to the easel to our left and carried on the drawing and did the same another two times. This use of mixed media made an interesting effect and worked really well on some of the images.