Recent Life drawings

It's been a while since I last did proper life drawing and it's hard to find classes in the summer, but I felt a strong need to get back into it so yesterday I splashed out on a slightly more expensive class than the ones I've been to in the past (previous post).

I've been trying to move away a little bit from the construction method à la Glen Vilppu. Vilppu's method is excellent for drawing figures from your mind and I'm still using it, but I think there's benefit in learning more approaches to drawing.
I need to give my mate John Aggs a great thanks for getting me Henry Yan's figure drawing book. Henry Yan has been a great source of inspiration for how to use charcoal, as has Nathan Fowkes.

My favourite from this session is probably this last one. It was one of the shorter poses, 5 mins, but I think enough information is suggested to make it readable and the pose ended before I could screw it up too much. When given longer time there's more of a risk for over-working the drawing.

I find it difficult to get the value relationships right. It's very easy to make something darker or lighter than it should be. I've heard that squinting is the trick but it's hard to see the right things.

Now that term is over it's become quite difficult to find cheap life drawing classes in Cambridge. The class I caught yesterday is run by Mark Rigby and it was unfortunately the last one for this summer. The next batch of classes start on the 8th of September. The class was held in St Barnabas Press on Coldham's Road. The building is a printing facility, mostly for artistic prints, and they also offer small studio spaces for artists.

These classes aren't cheap - £17 per session, but materials and easels are provided and the sessions are fairly long (3 hours, with a short coffee break). This particular class was not taught but Mark also teaches at the Hills Road Sixth Form College, and those classes are more structured.

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Mark Rigby's Life drawing classes - Link
Hills Road Sixth Form College art & design classes - Link
St Barnabas Press - Link

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.

HGO Life drawing: Day 3

In the third day of the first week we covered the basics of head construction. I had never seen this particular way of head construction before so it was very useful. It's a lot easier handle the head if you break it down into regions and surfaces. I often fall into the trap of focusing on details before the structure is understood. The construction lines help by simplifying the structure so that you can locate the broad shapes before narrowing down on details like eyes and lips. I feel that this way it's less likely that you will end up with wonky and uneven features.

Here's a video of a head drawing where I try to follow the construction steps we learnt. I'm afraid that the lighting is quite bad however, so it's hard to see the lines.

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HGO Life drawing: Day 1
HGO Life drawing: Day 2

HGO Life drawing: Day 2

It's been a bit of a break since my last post on the life drawing course I did at the University of Gotland this summer. The first 4 days of the course were probably some of the most intense ones. On day 2 we did some focusing on arms and legs. The big take-away thing for me this day was probably the way the shoulder can be visualised as being a flat plate connected to the collar bones. The plate can be seen as the end of the cylinder which forms the arm and helps in describing the direction of the arm.

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HGO Life drawing: Day 1

HGO Life drawing: Day 1

I've finally scanned in some life drawing sketches from the first week of class at the University of Gotland (HGO). We're already 6 weeks in now but somehow I feel that those first intense days were some of the most rewarding ones. That week we were burning through paper at a furious rate. It was exhausting but fun as well. Pernilla would go around looking at people's work one at the time and angle her advise to each person's level.
There was a lot to go through in those first 3 ½ days since we had get along on our own for the subsequent 3 weeks . I was a bit disappointed when I realised how little actual model & teaching time we had in the course. Pernilla commutes to Gotland for a few days once every few weeks. In between we have a model for one afternoon each week and a weekly assignment to send to Pernilla.
In a way it probably could have been expected since HGO is not an art school. Many of the people attending the class are either current Game Development of Industrial Design students at HGO and they get models through another local art school. Still, I would have loved to have a few intense days like those first ones every week. I think the effects would be quite noticeable.

I've compiled som drawings from the first day. Comparing with more recent drawings, these seem more lively and spontaneous... but also a lot messier. It might be because we were focusing on movement and gesture at the very beginning. A lot of people were pretty much beginners at life drawing so it was important to establish some proceedure. In later weeks we started looking more at form and we got a (*cough* stiffer *cough*) male model, so the drawings lost some of the spark in my opinion.


Some notes from the first day:

• Start by getting the overall rythm/direction of the body. S-curves or C-curves (if bent over) are often great for this.
  
• Use curved lines to get the movement and the gesture, but avoid symmetry. Let the lines flow into each other through the body while pushing from one extreme to the other.

• The direction/angle of the shoulders is not necessarily the same as the torso. The shoulders can move somewhat independently.
  
• The nipples, on the other hand, are good markers for determining the angle of the ribcage.
• The S-curved is used all the time to describe organic shapes, get used to it!
• The "body bean" is a good shorthand for describing stretch, compression and twist.
• Use the neck/head line as a marker when drawing the head from the back. It indicates the tilt and direction of the head which can often be hard to see from the back.

As a final note, this type of life drawing is most famously taught by Glenn Vilppu who has a great video series to complement his Vilppu Drawing Manual. It's a form of life drawing that lends itself well to animeation, and comics for that matter, since you learn to construct the body without a model.

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University of Gotland (HGO) - link
Life Drawing at HGO - link
Pernilla Persson - link
Glenn Vlippu - link

The King is Dead

I got into pop music way too late to have caught the Michael Jackson wave but he was a legend and touched so many lives. The world's reaction is a testament to his greatness.


For the first time I spent some time watching his videos on Youtube. I was watching a song called Beat It when it struck me how expressive and full of gesture his dancing style is.
We may exaggerate people's gestures to create more lively and expressive poses (which they often do in animation), but in Jackson 's case he is that exaggeration. His dancing is constantly pushing the limits... bending, stretching, twisting and turning.

I did a Google image search for "Michael Jackson gesture", and found Alex Woo, who has worked as a story artist on Wall-E. He taught a life drawing class back in 2008 where he used Jackson as an example for gesture drawing and camera awareness (link). He makes the point that Jackson is a master at positioning himself as to create the most striking and readable silhouette against the camera, and that artists shouldn't be afraid of manipulating poses to clarify the action.

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Beat It on Youtube - (link)
Alex Woo - link
Michael Jackson gives some insight into gesture drawing - link

Friday life drawing

Today was the last session for this term. Once again, we had a male model.
I think my focus was not as good as last time. It was quite hard to see things with an analytical eye. No excuses, but I wonder if the fidgety and bored-looking model could have had something to do with it.

The Cambridge University Architecture Undergraduate Handbook strongly encourages first years to attend these sessions. At the end of the class I asked one of the architecture students about how life drawing was supposed to help them in their studies. He didn't seem to be quite sure himself. I can imagine that architectural drawings must be quite different from life drawing, but perhaps this enforces the idea that life drawing is a strong basis for any kind of art.

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.