I'm collecting an account of any life drawing classes I attend into one post, with the intention of charting its journey and being able to make comparisons and observations.
Drawing from life and improving how I draw the human form generally was one of the objectives in my study statement.
Saturday Sketch Club with the Royal Academy Sat Feb 25th 2023
Last weekend I did an online life drawing class as part of the RA Saturday sketch club. I've not done one of these classes before and am keen to keep my life drawing and figurative skills up as this is an area I find challenging when painting and drawing. The figures I do (often/mostly) don't turn out how I want them to in my head and perhaps being aware of this makes me tense so it sort of perpetuates!
I think the challenge of doing these online classes is that there's no choice over the pose and model (in a way there would be if say I asked a few friends to pose for me, clothed!) In this instance I found the model really hard to draw and at times I felt like giving up! But I got to the end of class and if nothing else, I know it's something I need to continue!
8 min drawing with my right hand. The aim for this was to slow down (as you physically can't move quickly when using your non dominant hand!) and actually it really did help with close looking.
'Blind' drawing.
Looking more closely at angles
Draw Brighton online life drawing Wednesday March 1st 2023
I really enjoyed this session and felt my drawing was more confident than the class I did last week with the RA. I'm not sure why, but maybe because the poses the model did were interesting and dynamic without being too contorted or challenging!
We started with some 1 minute poses:
Before moving onto 3 minutes poses. I think in a way the 3 minutes ones are harder as you know you have a bit longer to look, but not long to render much detail. The one minute poses almost give permission to draw almost blindly, keeping your eye on the figure to get as much information down as possible.
There were some longer poses of 6 minutes next. I was using A4 paper and in the most part this felt like a good size. It did make me think of larger newsprint pieces on boards that I used to work on during in person life drawing classes and it would ne good to return to this too. But online classes like this are affordable and really practical so I'll definitely be doing some more!
London Drawing Saturday 4th March
I did an online class with London Drawing (who I only heard about recently) where there were two models in the same room. I thought this could be a really great way to improve my vocabulary of drawing people who are interacting. At the moment, I'm not getting this quite right and struggle to not make the figures look too 'pretty'. For some reason I find getting a more raw energy into figures when they are solo.
Anyway, the poses were great and I could tell that the recent classes I've been doing have begun to strengthen my observation and confidence with line. The challenge will be to find ways to push these figurative sketches towards more refined pieces.
