[Drawing] Brought to life pt.1

THE CLASS

Nothing in a morning can prepare you for a face full of naked. Nothing.
Nevertheless, we are now back onto life drawing in our second year so this post will be about the class and what I take from it.

The first picture we drew was a basic, 15 minute pose using pencil. Having a simple introductory pose like this is a big help to push past the awkward situation. After this pose, we were told to write three positives and three negatives. With work like this, I have a hard time praising myself as I know I'm a lot better drawing from imagination than observation. My three negative points were:

1. Wrong proportions. The legs seem way too long
2. Stubby arms. I had trouble trying to foreshorten the arms to match the pose.
3. LEARN TO DRAW FEET. I'm always bad at drawing feet, simple!

I only managed to come up with one thing I liked, and that's that I built it up from basic shapes first, but seeing as we only had 15 minutes, I didn't have much time to think carefully about it. To help cheer myself up, I drew little comical doodles next to the drawings.

The next bunch of pictures we had were all experimental. This sort of work really bugs me at first as I obsess over tidiness whenever I draw,so to have something messy such as the set of pictures above makes me snap.

TOP LEFT

 This first picture was using pen only, which meant I couldn't hide any of the construction work as I normally do. Due to this, I found my work geting progressively looser and less structured as the pictures went along, relying only on my hand/eye coordination instead. I think this pose was only 5 minutes, so all I could get down was a gesture line and a rough of the body.

TOP RIGHT

This next picture was done with one continuous line. A lot of the time on this one was looking at the model, rather than the paper and the lines are a lot rounder with less attention to detail.

BOTTOM LEFT

This drawing was done with my left hand. I hate drawing with my left hand. I think during this one I was more focused on keeping the pen moving properly that I payed less attention to the model, which is the opposite of the previous picture. The proportions are way off and the overall pose is just sloppy. However, for my left hand, it's not as bad as I thought it would be.

BOTTOM CENTER

This drawing was done holding the pen by the nib, and pointing it directly down. This was possibly the most disorientating of them all as I wasn't paying attention to the model or the picture, but the pen itself. I couldn't see the marks my pen were making as my hand obscured the nib, so it was a "draw of faith" so to speak. The result; an alien life form taking a squat in the bushes...

BOTTOM RIGHT

The opposite of the previous picture, I had little control over the pen this time as I was holding it by the top. Again, I was more focused on the way I was holding the pen than worrying about accuracy. The top half was half acceptable, but I was drawing a lot slower and had to rush the legs to get them complete in time.

The final bunch of drawings, three of which used a medium I really dislike, charcoal.

These three seemed to focus more on the negative space rather than the model. I did however, like one of these. For two poses we coloured the paper black and used an eraser to take out the negative space. The first one I did (the full body) I actually enjoyed. The picture had me focusing on the form rather than just the outline as my drawings often are so it was a change that actually helped.

We finished up the lesson by doing what was in my opinion, the best part of the session for animators. We drew a series of 30 second poses to see how quickly we could draw them down. The end result is a continuous, Muybridge like sequence of images showing the model going from a crouching position, to walking, and crouching again. This was good practice for gesture lines too as well as simplifying the build of the human body.

THE HOMEWORK

After drawing class, I wanted to see if I could apply anything from the first session to my own work. I previously stated that I draw better from my imagination than observation, so hopefully I can back that statement up in this part of the entry.

As a warmup, I drew this picture live, there are a lot of errors with it, bad composition, a weak pose and poor light balance, but this was just to get back into the gist of drawing cartoons again rather than people.

You can watch a recording of the stream below:

The second image I made turned out a lot better:

This image was intended to show the darker side of the city I'm creating, as well as showing the personality of "Lily" a little more. I tried to make the city look darker while keeping the vibrant feel to it. I think the costume change on Lily to a hoodie and gloves helped create the atmosphere a bit more too, but these aren't the important parts for this post. 

It may not look it, but I had to think a fair bit about how this pose would work. I rarely include a character's full body in a shot, and I also rarely draw from a rear 3/4 angle, but I wanted to test myself with this one.
You can see the drawing of it below:

Drawing this, I noticed that I was  thinking more about the physical space that the character takes up, and how they relate to the perspective in the picture, I even drew a grid on the "ground" to decide how the hands should be placed.