Sunday 29 January 2012

Life Drawing with Charcoal


Life drawing was great this week. John is such a fantastic model. He takes it very seriously indeed and practises holding unusual positions in preparation for his sessions. He has a book on tai chi, so before each of our 2 minute poses, he was doing the moves then suddenly freezing, striking a series of very tricky poses with his arms straight out in the air:


We always do lots of these to warm up, which is my favourite part, as there's no time to do anything but trust to instinct and just draw, relying totally on hand/eye co-ordination and not really 'thinking' at all. 

We then a couple of 10 minute ones, before a longer pose of about 40 minutes. The long one is usually my weakest, as the time makes me hesitant and I tend to over-complicate. So this week I decided to go with charcoal and think more about tone than line for a change. Good fun but VERY messy! 


After the session we all nosy at each other's work. John got out a sketchbook: when he is not modelling. he sometimes draws. I was blown away - wonderful drawings, very simple but totally incisive and rich with sexy marks and lines. He's says he's been doing it about a year - wow.

3 comments:

Maureen said...

I love life drawing - just a newbie so still on my steep learning curve. My biggest weakness - of many - is legs. They so often end up too short, even when I start off making a huge effort.

Starting this week I've started to use a pen to go over the drawing to make the legs the right length!

Anonymous said...

Will you be posting John's drawings?

Lynne the Pencil said...

John doesn't come with me to life drawing yet - he is still finding his way back to drawing after a rest of about 25 years! He mostly doesn't even draw at the SketchCrawls, but is getting there slowly...