Awkward Poses

Life Drawing

This week in life drawing, we focused more on proportions and how to achieve them correctly in a variety of fairly awkward and interesting positions. Starting off with four ten mine poses, we focused entire on this aspect whilst trying to avoid any details which could easily be added in later if needed. After this, we then returned to one of our previous ten minute images and began adding more detail, using a selection of chalks and charcoal to add definition and general shadow.

The first sketch I attempted did not go very well as proportion wise, I made the body far too long and the legs too short. This also made areas such as the arms impossible to correct. All of these mistakes were caused due to my general poor planning and failed use of the seven row grid as Gordon was seven heads high. I did quite like how the stomach and upper body turned out, even with the odd proportions. I tried to use what I had learnt in the following sketches.

With this sketch, I tried to follow the same principles with the seven head high grid but once again ran in to problems. Whilst drawing the outline, I made the body three to four heads high and the legs two and a half due to how poorly I sectioned off each part. Apart from this, the proportions would have looked quite nice and been successful if the legs were brought up by a head height. On top of this, this was also one of the drawings we decided to re-visit, spending forty more minutes to correct and then add colour to.

In this time, I needed to widen the head, define the shoulders a little more and then attempt to correct the body proportions. I managed to bring the legs up slightly and then made the upper body less wide but apart from that, I couldn’t really add any more corrections. Shading wise, I tried to use the lighter colours where light was hitting Gordon whilst using charcoal and darker chalk to define the areas of shadow and general curves.

For this next image, I tried a new technique which I had not really touched or generally thought about since the first few life drawing classes. This was to draw the pelvis, ribcage and shoulderblades seperately before joining them with a spine, as this allowed me to get the main focus points in proportion whilst having the spine naturally bridge them togather, it made the building process far easier and left me with a skelington which I could then draw round for the finer details.

I will be using them technique almost exclusively in the future as it provides me with the best results.

This drawing was going to be an extention to the previous one but as the angle was rather painful for Gordon, he chose a different one. Due to the incredibly awkward pose, it took the vast majority of the forty minutes just to get the proportions correct but due to the technique I used previously, this was far easier than if I had tried to do the head hight/ grid method.

After adding a bit of definition using charcoal, it began looking more natural and a lot of depth could then be seen. I think this and the previous drawing were the best out of the entire session.