Sunday 29 November 2009

Life drawing in charcoal

Charcoal is very much a hit and miss medium for me at the moment. Most of the time I find it difficult to control but every now and then something shapes up more than usual.
My first breakthrough was probably when I stopped using the charcoal as a pencil and started using the side of the stick. This brought about an intuitive shift of mind from thinking in terms of lines to focusing more on masses, and that's pretty much the whole idea behind this drawing.




It's amazing to see what masters like Henry Yan can achieve with the same primitive medium. His figure drawing book is on my ever-growing Amazon wish list.

It's been almost exactly a year since my first blog post on life drawing at The Shop in Cambridge, which is still where I go for life drawing. I'm glad to see that there seems to have been some improvement since then.

3 comments:

Kate said...

As I said on Twitter, this is lovely! :D My life-drawings have always been piles of crap XD

Lolipopgi said...

Hey, I'm the girl that drew Byakuya and said she was following your blog. :P So here I am!
Was lovely meeting you today; a lot of people have said you are very cute too. I agree.
Lolli <3

nana said...

@Kate: Aww cheers! It's okay to produce crap life drawings though, it's good practice. The sooner you get through the crap the sooner you get to the good stuff. ^^

@Lolipopgi: Oh hello! Thanks for dropping by and it was nice meeting you too! It was a very nice entry!
Judging was extremely difficult... there was a lot of good stuff. Keep on drawing!! :)