This is the second installment of my life drawing efforts for the year to date:
Returning to the more familiar medium of charcoal, this first piece was a ten-minute warm up sketch.
While this second drawing was a longer study, using a mid-tone paper with chalk and charcoal, looking at tone.
Andy
Hi Andy, 
Good to see your studies! One thing I might recommend with respect to charcoal media is getting a sandpad such as they sell at art supply stores, and sanding down your charcoal to a point. That will give you the ability to draw with a variety of thick / thin lines, whereas with blunt charcoal, you can only get a thick line.
Not that you have to use charcoal pencils, but I recommend them (6B, soft) because they are not nearly as messy as sticks and they are easier to sharpen with an exacto and sand to a point - this post shows what media I use:
http://www.foundationalarts.com/cgi-bin/forums/ikonboard.cgi?act=ST;f=12;t=12
Try seeing what you can get with line only - no tone. Experiment with thick and thin lines - a thin line will make the form recede in space, a thicker one denotes what is nearer. I also highly recommend trying several master copies in charcoal - for example, by Rubens and Michelangelo. It will really teach you a lot.
Cheers,
-Rebeccak
This is the final installment of my life drawing for the year so far. These sketches are from two weeks ago (class was cancelled because of an open evening last week) - the first pair were 10 minute warm up sketches, and the other study was about half an hour.
Rebeccak: Thanks for stopping by - your tips for using charcoal are very insightful, i’ll have to have a go and will post my results in due course…
AndyO,
I encourage you to do anatomical studies in between your drawing classes - this will keep your drawing arm fresh and also inform your life drawings when you next have a class.
Cheers!
Thanks for the encouragement guys!
Here’s three drawings i’ve done over the past week or so - i’ve attempted the thicker/thinner line thing to pull elements of the drawing forward and backwards… give it some depth… i’ll try and squeeze in a couple of masters copies this week to analyze how they’ve done it…
Andy
Definitely keep going with these master studies, they will teach you more than just about anything can about drawing! Looking forward to more.
Great work on the Michaelangelo copies, especially the male figure, the curves in that look great. Defintely keep up with those and you’re bound to see an improvement in your own figure stuff.
Rebecca, Zephyri, anandpg: Thanks for stopping by, and for your kind words.
Another master copy that I did sometime last week:
…and a couple of other pages from my sketchbook:
I realised (a little too late) that I hadn’t given him enough forehead, and the top of his head looks a bit flat as a result…
Updates from my life drawing class; this first sketch was from two weeks ago, where we returned to tone, utilising cross-hatching. I found it quite difficult to achieve much with pen/pencil - I felt I got a better result with this chalk 'n charcoal combo
Second update from my life drawing class; this week we continued the tone theme. For the first two sketches we covered a sheet of paper in charcoal, and used a rubber to introduce lighter tones (first 30 mins, second 20mins):
For the final sketch of the session, we crushed the charcoal into a dust and painted it on with fingers (approx 20 minutes):
One more sketch from me - this I actually did do today! A ballet dancer from photographic reference:
That’s all for now.
Andy
Hi…Andy…
A real pleasure going through your thread…lots of hard work , great studies,…and progress…:applause:
Looking forward to seeing more…
TAKE CARE
Glenn
Strong efforts here! I think the main thing is to loosen up your grip on the drawing medium a bit and allow the form to breathe while retaining control of the media. Try just practicing on a page a number of random, calligraphic marks just to sort of loosen up a bit before drawing. When cross hatching, try not to cross hatch for cross - hatching sake - really try hard to determine the topology of the form, and shade according to it. Another way to analyze form is to look for shadow shapes and to draw according to them. The key is to keep things loose but to maintain control over your strokes. Just takes a lot of practice - and looking at master drawings, which contain all of the answers.
Glen: Thanks for your comment!
Rebeccak: You sound a bit like my life drawing tutor (it’s a good thing 
) - I tend to tighten up far too quickly on drawings, which can cause me problems with speed (I start drawing very slowley) and with accuracy… loosening up is the way forward, and i’ve noticed a difference in the way I work when I do manage to do it successfully.
–
I’ve been attempting a few sketches from my imagination (trying to put all these figure studies to use!) and thought i’d have a go at working one up digitally. This idea is a wip for a fallen angel, making a last grasp at her falling halo. I haven’t decided on attire, or whether she will remain ‘as is’ - I wanted to get the figure correct proportionally first though, and any suggestions on how to improve this before I get too much further ahead would be most welcome:
Cheers,
Andy
Hi Andy,
Lol at sounding like your instructor. I like the torso a lot but think the legs are looking small at this point. Also you might want to redraw the hand as that is flattening out a bit.
It’s funny because I remember in college when I was first able to do some imaginational drawings. It was a thrill, I could finally begin to put down on the page what I had in my head. Glad to see that you have started to do that as well.
Hey Andy,
about loosening up…
try to really REALLY set your mind to “expecting zero quality mode” before drawing.
a classmate of me has the same issue (I used to as well). The problem is when you make 2, 3 parts of a drawing well (spending a lot of time on it) that there might be fear to screw things up, which I think is a bad thing because it locks up your spontane creativity.
it is something to work at that doesn’t go away over night, but when you keep at it all the sudden you will realise at some point in the past you will have made a mental click… to realize that is a very nice feeling of freedom. And that is a nice goal to strive for don’t you agree?
