[Drawing] Stevahkiin

This life drawing session showed the triumphant return of our life model from first year, Steve. Often remembered by the group for his action poses, this session covered just that.

For our final project in drawing this year, the group are going to be making a battle mural with a variety of poses taken from life drawing sessions. We'll be drawing 5 people each in dynamic fighting poses and adding armour and weapons to create a collaborative picture similar to the cityscape we made at the start of the year. For this first session, we practiced with short, dynamic poses. Each set of drawings included a 2 minute rough sketch, a 10 minute full body sketch, and a 10 minute close up sketch focusing on a certain detail, either hands, feet, or the head.

For the first set, Steve took a stabbing pose with a sword. Unfortunately I didn't have the best angle to make the pose look dynamic and due to this being the first picture, I didn't manage to capture as much of the figure as I'd hoped.

Possibly my favourite drawing from the day. I've been working with hands a lot in my current animation and thought I'd practice at drawing the clenched fist. As I was drawing, a lot of the focus was on the lighting, and also the pressure in his hand. I managed to capture the pressure of a clenched fist by making the lines around the middle of the picture noticeably heavier than the outside lines. I'm fairly happy with this hand structure and the loose shading style I used. A problem of mine is the speed I draw at, and I think a lot of this has to do with me making my lines neat in the same way I draw digitally. Once I adapted back to traditional drawing I found myself loosening up a bit more.

 For the second set of images, Steve took an archer pose. This was the most interesting of the session for me as there was a lot of strength in the pose, which is something I'd like to work on more.

 For the first pose, I didn't complete the body as I really wanted to focus on the strength in the upper body, I also noticed that his chest took on an more complicated shape as he locked his arm in place and tried to capture this in my picture. Due to Steve being thin, there was a lot more detail to draw in his ribs on this pose too as they showed through more and cast a shadow.

Unfortunately on the second pose, Steve had slacked his arrow arm a little, making the pose lose a lot of strength, the arrow was now being held as chest height, rather than eye level. Instead I chose to focus on the chest, neck and bow arm to bring the strength through. As with the first picture, focusing on the upper body meant I didn't have time to complete the legs. He took a wide stance to support himself.

I decided to focus on hands again the second time round. I had another strong clenched fist to draw, so I took the opportunity to draw it from the other side for reference. As with the torso, there was a lot of extra detail showing through with the strong pose. In the hands this included bones and veins that I tried to capture the shadows of. I also looked at the curves in his hand, such as the inverse curve at the top of the hand, leading up to his knuckle.

 I thought I'd change the composition on this page and have two sets of drawings next to each other. The first (left) showed Steve taking on a pose holding a broadsword. Unlike the bow pose, this one was more close together, and his footing was less spread, to make the pose more defensive.

 I wanted to focus on a foot this time round as they're not my strongest point, I started to look at the structure more in this picture and simplified it in my head to a circle ball joint and a trapezium. The main part I had trouble with was the middle of the foot, capturing the form of this section is something I need to practice when I next get the chance.

 The final pose gave me a pretty poor selection of areas to focus on, so I thought I'd try my hand at hair, bringing out the different shades and textures.

 I didn't find this particular pose interesting to draw, so I went for a lighter shading on the picture. I put most of my time into getting the chest and shoulders translated onto paper.

For the final pose of the day, I suggested a defensive shield. I got this pose from the back, which was perfect for this idea. I remember there being some interesting shadows across his back, but these didn't translate as well as I'd hoped on paper and ruin the shape of his back.

At the end of the session, we were told that we'd be continuing these poses next week. I'm going to try and make my poses look a lot more dynamic next time round and really capture the strength behind them as I started to in some of these drawings.

This song is also needed: