Life Drawing (2) - Practice and Lines

This session was spent practicing the techniques that we learnt in the first session, like using a pencil to measure the head and that a standing pose typically is 7 1/2 heads tall. Plus we could add some shading into the sketches today when we had time. I liked learning about the shading technique of just using lines - I think it's a lot quicker, it creates more defined shapes and it looks more professional than shading by smudging, so I tried to implement it to create extra form in the figures. Below are my first few attempts.

A hour drawing

Then we moved onto looking at the lines and angles in the figure to get the basic shape. I enjoyed using this technique as it enabled me to draw more quickly, getting the shape down so that I could check proportions, before moving onto defining the smaller shapes, curves and details of the figure. Below are my angular drawings.

Quick sketchbook drawing

 I really like this technique as you get the impression of the figure down in a simple, but quick and effective way that still looks like a figure and is visually appealing.


I found this session really useful as it meant that I could implement the skills that I had learnt before as well as learning a different, perhaps quicker technique to help improve my life drawing skills.

After the session as well I was able to do an extra drawing of my Dad asleep. This was good practice, except that he moved more than the models even though he was asleep, so I had to draw quite quickly and adding the folds of the material in seemed kind of strange after drawing only naked people for the past few weeks... and now he's wary whenever I get paper and a pencil out.