[Drawing] Steve the barbarian

This was possibly my worst drawing lesson this year. For some reason I just couldn't get into the zone at all and I feel this shows through with my work, which is unfortunate because this was one of the most useful lessons we've had. The goal of this session was to capture a series of dynamic poses with a 30 second rough sketch, followed by a 5 minute drawing. These would be used as reference material for our battle mural.

For the first series of images I feel as if my rough sketches were bringing across more information than the final pictures. This may be because they were still in structure form. I was also finding it difficult to finish the figures in time, so I ended up rushing at points. I remember making better use of time in the rough drawing and falling short in the finals.

The second sheet of drawings after a break and some food. I felt like I was making more progress with these ones, but I'm still unhappy with the drawing quality, a lot of lines are in the wrong places, and the thickness difference can be distracting.

After we were done with the poses, we refreshed ourselves on an old lesson, drawing the head from different angles. These were again, 5 minute poses and I started to struggle for time more and more as the model turned to face me head on. One thing I've noticed since drawing the picture below is that I have a hard time getting lips correct, the second picture on the bottom row is probably my best so far for this, as well as my favourite drawing of the day. Once again, as with other life drawing sessions I feel I need to loosen up a little  and quit obsessing over the small details to start with. For the second to last picture, I noticed I'd already drawn this pose, so I decided to try my hand at caricaturing Steve. I'm pretty happy with the sharp, structured result and found this to be a fun observed practice rather than drawing from a photo.

A painting I did a while ago in Photoshop to demonstrate my weakness when it comes to drawing lips.

All in all, I'm pretty unhappy with my performance in this session, whether it was because of sleep deprivation, or just not being in the creative zone on that day, I hope the next life drawing session brings more success, and more complete drawings.