life drawing - full body

today we had a full body life drawing session, we had to draw from a nude model and this proved to be quite challenging, we started with a drawing a two poses both in which we only had 15 minutes, for our first drawing we were instructed to use pencil and then for the second we were told to use charcoal. The main problem with my first drawings is that parts of the body are out of proportion.

For the second drawing we were shown a method of measuring using our pencils where we measured the height of the head which would become one section and then measure down the body with the same scale to get the correct length of the body and this proved to be very useful and improved the quality of my work. As i became more comfortable with my drawing i began to use the side of my charcoal to add marks to the body as it gave a lighter more shadowed effect.

We were then allowed a short break from our drawing to research into Leonardo Da Vinci's work such as "vitruvian man" which was a way of working out proportion that relates to architecture, after researching into this we returned back to drawing which was still becoming easier the more i did it, this time we were told to do different scaled images and try and fit three to a page, we were given 20 minutes for the first and then 10 minutes for the other two. For the 10 minute ones i focused on key lines that made the figure clear rather than focusing on the details.

for the final three drawings we had to do we were given only 5 minutes for each which i thought would be quite challenging but was actually easy when i put my full focus and attention into it and i was quite pleased with the result i got and learning the pencil proportion skill really helped, as well as looking into Da Vinci's work .

On Tuesday the12th march a week after our first full body session we had another session but this time with an older male model, the same techniques were applied but the male body was much more square and muscular than the females and so it had more tones and lines.

in this session we drew from poses that we had not previously seen and drew certain sections of the body in a larger scale with quite a lot of detail.

The following week we had our third life drawing session, for this we had the male model again, we started out by doing two large 10 minute charcoal drawings just to get us warmed up, i was quite disappointed with my first two drawings as some of the body parts were drawn too thin or fat. 

for our third drawing we were given an hour and a half, we had to draw one image that was the full a2 size and then collage it to create tones on the body for example to show muscles and shadows, i chose to use cartridge paper as my base to draw on and then using a glue stick and watered down PVA glue i layered brown paper, black and white print and tissue paper i also used masking tape for some tones as well and i feel that this was quite effective. I was very pleased with how it was coming together as a piece of work but i failed to work quick enough so was unable to finish it in the set time period.

life drawing - jenny saville style

today we had another life drawing class in which we had to focus on drawing the head and face, we were given the task of recreating a face in the style of jenny saville. i selected the image that jenny saville created (shown below) to draw in the style of because i liked the effect that the reds and oranges gave.

to create my own piece first i used a pencil to draw out a rough angular shape of the face and its details. i then used acrylic paints and only my fingers to apply the paint to the page, this was a messy process and proved hard to get the paint in smaller places but was useful as it was easier to blend the colours together.

the face began to look more realistic as i began to use thicker layers of paint and bigger and bolder strokes, i found that using white and also a pale orange were really good for adding highlights to the face.

When it came to going the inside of the eyes i was a bit uncomfortable as i know that the eyes can effect your work dramaticaly if they do not match with your image for example if they were looking the wrong way. I resolved this by using a graphite stick and white paint and was very pleased with the outcome, i then showed the colours that i had used to create my image in swatches underneath my completed image.

jenny saville

I find jenny savilles work to be quite interesting as it is quite abnormal.  I love the way that she creates larger images of the femail body, this to me seems to try to get the message that big is beautiful across and I find this to be what makes her work so unique, she shows that big women are can be used as models too aswell as smaller/slimmer women.

I don’t like the way that in some of her images she will draw parts of men onto the womans body such as penis’s, she may have had some reason behind this but I don’t think that it has any meaning and is a bit disturbing.

I like the way that jenny uses thick lashings of colour in her work and you can tell that she uses either a large brush or even her hand and I think this adds to the quality of her work and the use of unusual colours for parts of the body really has a good impact on her work.

life drawing

Evaluation of life drawing Tuesday 15/01/2013

we started the day by creating  an action plan which proved to be very helpful and motivationg as I had set myself targets and time limits doing this allowed me to plan how i was going to spend my time and what needed to be done

I found life drawing quite complicated as I find it hard to draw three dimensional objects especially parts of human the human body, I used two different materials to produce these drawings which were pencil and charcoal, even though using the charcoal made me uncomfortable when i though about drawing with it, I found it easyer to draw with compared to the pencil which I could rub out.

I used a range of techniques which included shading, smudging, using different tones and thicknesses and all of these contributed to making my work look a lot better and more realistic than before.
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I was quite pleased with the results that i got when i looked back after completing all my drawings but some of them were not very satisfying to look at as they were poorly drawn due to lack of detail and parts being out of proportion