FASHION: Life Drawing

Having little to no experience in artistic drawing, I wasn't sure what to expect from a day set out purely for life drawing. The aspect of having a model to sketch made for an interesting addition to my already sceptical mindset on drawing as I now had to sketch something in front of me instead of "doodling" from imagination or designing graphics which is where most of my experience is from. 

Due to the lack of experience in drawing, I didn't quite know where to start as I had quite a perfectionist ideology in my other work and knew that I would not be able to achieve that here. Following that, I was lucky enough to be in a very open environment with my class and therefore let go of any expectation and opened my mind up to just have a flowing attitude to the sketching.

These excercise above and below helped with this even more as they had such challenging guidelines, there was no other choice but to throw yourself out there and draw to the best that I could as an individual. Starting with a sequence of 4 simple line drawings that overlapped, I found quite quickly that although they weren't conventionally good drawings, the idea of simple shapes can even be considered artistic. Below are drawings that challenged both in timescale and technique. The idea that we had to now sketch two poses using charcoal taped to a meter long stick seemed somewhat ridiculous but it actually challenged my idea of drawing to such a level that I enjoyed the outcome a lot more due to this handicap.

_______________________________________________________________________

After the warmup of basic, short line drawings, we experimented with shading which I quickly got a relatively good handle on when considering my experience in this medium. The above picture was a simple shape drawn out from a simple pose which I then shaded with a 2B pencil, a graphite shader and a rubber. I was very happy with what I produced here as the gradients I was able to produce had quite a realistic feel and look to them, even if the shape I had drawn didn't.

We were then taught about proportion before having to attempt three poses using the technique taught to us. Although a very time consuming method, due to not really knowing how to draw proportions accurately, I got a nice result out of it in my opinion. The third image in particular I believe really grasped the proportion of the model well, something a lot of students (and me in particular) struggled with beforehand.

Being already very envious and admiring of Henri Matisse, his life drawings seemed perfect to look at following this workshop. Reason being is the very constructive way in which he creates his pieces, almost as though they are made up various parts that fluidly come together. Above is one of my favourite pieces by Matisse, and not just part of his life drawings but his overall work because its full of depth and radiates the energy of the model.