Life Drawing- First Session

Here is the work done for last Wednesday's life drawing session. 

Since it's our first session, I feel it's going to take some time to get back into the flow of it again. However, it's good to be back doing it. I was really looking forward to this session, and it didn't disappoint. 

I feel I've still managed to retain some of the advice given to me during the Foundation Course last year, and I aim this time round to further develop the following areas:

1- Composition: being able to scale properly, instead of unintentionally leaving/cutting off the subject, 

2- Proportion: scaling correctly- though this is a tad tricky because animation often excels when the subject is caricatured. I wonder if there's a way of retaining that life-like realism in my work without going down the route of the uncanny valley? 

3- Overall shape: I noticed in this session I tend to go from one limb to the other without starting with the overall shape of the image... this might not be a good thing, because it means I might not take the image's weight into account. That's why after each drawing, if I keep reverting back to my original way of drawing, I draw a smaller image next to it, with a single line and shapes to understand where the weight is being held in the model's body.  

4-Too many lines? 

Usually multiple lines are the only way I can find the right one that best illustrates what the body is doing, or what one limb is ultimately doing... however this makes the image messy, and sometimes unreadable if I spend too long on one image. 

5- Character

6- Diversity

I am thinking I should start experimenting with different mediums and line work possibly. 

Life drawings a good opportunity to improve on these things. It also gives you the opportunity to see everyone else working processes.

The thing I loved most about a lot of other student's work was their use of space in their images. There also seemed to be more emphasis on character, and their application of medium often worked in relation to this. This is something to keep in mind next time. 

Initial 20 (?) minute warm-up

 Proportion and composition, as we can see, need to be worked on here.
The face is probably too big in relation to the shoulders, but this (alongside the desire to draw it in a more realistic shape) was something I'm making a habit to keep consciously in mind, so that's good.

Four of the 5 minute poses

"Sorry what was that? Four poses on one page?!", she looks at the size of first drawing and wonders where everything else should go.

15 minute pose

The legs are definitely out of proportion here, possibly because I'd concentrated too much on the relation between one foot to the other, specifically, while ignoring the image as a whole.
When Robin (the model) was doing this pose, his right foot was in front of the left.
The problem was I made the left foot too long, so when I was drawing the right I knew it had to go further ahead of the other.
Naturally, both limbs are a tad too long. and while the last minute was spent frantically reducing the side of the right leg... by that point we'd quickly ran out of time.

While timing can be tricky to accommodate too... it's helpful because it pushes us into drawing quickly and expressively without overthinking the content. 

Additionally, 1- I managed to start drawing the face which I tend to leave out of habit, and 2- started working more with darker graphite so the image doesn't get lost on the page, which I'm happy about.

Needless to say, this session's given me plenty of things to work on next week!