Life Drawing

Hi Folks, with Christmas over its time to start working again.   In my last blog I was looking at the workshops that I had attended in the 1st semester.   I think I had got as far as speaking about casting, textiles, print and ceramics.   In this blog I wanted to talk about the life drawing workshops.    Off all of the workshops this is my absolute favourite.   If there was a life drawing class every day I'd be there.  At the start of the classes we were looking at how the body moved.   As Roisin said ' you won't be doing pretty drawings' and boy she wasn't kidding, but we were looking at what the body was doing.   Our job was to interpert   the movement and if we looked at these drawings after that we would have some sense of how the model moved or where her weight was in relation to her surroundings.    Once we got over our inhibitions of how our minds tell us what a figure should look like, we got drawing what she was doing and how she did it.

We started each session with warm ups and we let our pencils or charcoal wander around the page mapping the movement before us.    After that we looked at different ways to draw our model, we looked at drawing her as if she was a straw or twig figure, as if she was made of snow or my favourite drawing her from the inside out, as if I was sculpting her, looking at where her weight was.   I also enjoyed drawing with my left hand, some blind drawing and removing my hand from direct contact with the page by putting my charcoal on the end of a long bamboo stick.
I suppose its kind of hard to visualise what I'm on about so I'll show you a few examples below. 

This is some of my work attempting to draw from the inside out.   Before now I had a preconceived notion that I should start my drawings like most people might do from the head working my way down, but with this method I started to look at where I could see weight and as in the one directly above  constructing my way out from the centre or core and extending it down the legs.   Roisin asked us to think that we were building our drawings out of wire and to think about how we would work if we were using wire.    I loved this way of working.   I started all of these drawings using little circular motions building them up as I went along and they started to form a trunk, legs, shoulders and arms.

The next drawings are the ones I did with the pencil or charcoal attached to a bamboo cane,  some of these don't work that well as photographs but you should get the idea.   Again I loved the challenge of this method and boy was it a challenge, but it made every mark I made important and I forgot about stereotyping my figure because I couldn't afford the time to look at anything other than what the model was doing and trying to make a mark on the page to convey this.

These are more drawings done with the bamboo cane, they may be easier to see not as shiny as the ones above.

Below are my left hand drawings.   This was another way of making me draw differently, engaging the other side of my brain.   I have to say I loved these results.

In the next drawings I was trying to imagine my model was made of straw and this is what happened!

Looking at the model as if she were made of snow, a dense mass.

And lastly my blind drawing or should I say drawings, there is more than one here but I'm not sure what you'll think you see or even if you can see a figure at all.  As well as being a blind drawing I was working with my pencil at the end of the long bamboo cane, not that I wanted to make it more difficult, have to say I like this one.

Contextually while doing the life drawing I was looking at the work of Claude Heath, I've included some images of his work.   Also reading 'The natural way to draw' by Kimon Nicolaides.

Getting tired, hope you have some idea of what I got up to in life drawing classes, what I've shown you is only a small selection of stuff that I hope illustrates the points I was trying to make.   Hopefully these classes will resume in the next semester.    If they do, you'll know where to find me!