Another week of life drawing. I forgot all my equipment so I just worked in the charcoal supplied by the school.

We started with a few five minute poses and I was a bit rusty as I’d missed a week. Here’s one (the others were terrible and on such flimsy paper I jettisoned them). I quite like this one although in terms of likeness it’s not really that close.

And then we had a longer one hour pose. I often rush through this and finish way before the end and spend time tinkering or trying some other angles on fresh drawings.  This week I took my time and worked more methodically.

Looking at it now some of the light and dark seems out of balance, but it was actually a reasonable likeness so that’s something!

It’s a new term and I have switched group at The Royal Drawing School to one that is focussing on the head rather than the whole form.

Drawing the figure is hard and I think drawing the face is the hardest part (followed by hands and then feet in that order!) mainly because I know I over think that part. I forget to just relax and draw what I see rather than try to make it look ‘right’.

So how did week one go? OK.

We started with some quick poses, 10 and 15 minutes.

And the moved onto some longer poses. I tried not to worry about likeness too much but focus on structure, light and shadow and hope that some sort of likeness would be a side product of that. Kind of worked.