Life drawing at The Shop

Fridays 2-4 pm, The Shop, Cambridge is on my agenda from now onwards for life drawing sessions.
Today was the second time I went and we had a male model, which apparently is quite rare. Whenever I've been to life drawing so far it's been pretty evenly distributed between male and female models, so I'm guessing my sampling population is still too small.


The life drawing classes are organised by the Cambridge University Architecture Society and is open to the public. Each session is a mere £2 for members (anyone can join for £15) and £4 for non-members.
The sessions are quite informal. There is a teacher who will dictate the length of the poses and suggest things to focus on, but you are also free to do your own studies. Drawing material is supplied, but today I grabbed my own pad since I find huge sheets of loose paper hard to handle.

It 's interesting how the first drawing of the day turned out rather badly, but how things got progressively better. It's a bit like exercising I guess, warm-ups are needed.

Most of the poses were around 5 minutes. These are roughly in the order they were drawn.

If there's something I don't get it's blind drawing, where you look only at the model and not at the paper. The teacher was introducing it as a way to loosen up and get some new marks down. We were also encouraged to use out left hand. When it comes to blind drawing I found that it doesn't matter what hand I use, the result ends up the same, which is pretty interesting.
The final pose was 25 minutes.

At the moment I have quite a hard time controlling the medium - charcoal in particular, since I have almost no previous experience with it. You can get some nice subtle shades with charcoal by smudging it, but for me it ends up rather messy. Also, drawing big seems essential. With my sligtly-larger-than-A4 sketch pad it was difficult to do any renders at all with charcoal.
Instead, I found it easier to use a soft 6B pencil, only I forgot to bring a sharpener so it quickly got worn down.