[Drawing] Back to life... drawing

After a break, we've now resumed life drawing classes. This time we had a brand new model, Martin. The focus of this week's session was to be able to accurately draw the proportions of our model. To do this we drew a triangle across the page that would act as our scale, from here we drew the model in quick poses, starting large and gradually getting smaller as we went along. The class were all fairly rusty after a few weeks without life drawing, so our first pictured were out of scale. After what we called a practice picture, we then drew 7 consecutive poses, starting at 15 minutes and ending up at 5 minutes.
Around the 4th picture from the right, I was drawing too slowly and decided to try being looser with my technique. This helped speed up and I actually prefer the outcome more.
Once we were done, we all discussed our work. Most people said that (not counting the first)the final picture was their worst, but I thought that was my best of the bunch. I'd probably say that the fourth was my worst as I still need to work on foreshortening, and I also didn't finish it in time.
As a model, Martin was great to draw, he had a good body shape to work with. I find Steve difficult to draw at times as he's very thin, so lines don't flow very well. Overall from this session I learned that I can loosen up my drawing style, while keeping accurate results. I feel as if I'm getting a lot better at time management too. When I was life drawing in my first year I would often have a mad rush at the end of the pose to get everything down, often ruining the entire picture. I would put a lot of focus on the clean line art rather than accurately creating shape and form on paper.