Life Drawing at the Sheffield Millenium Gallery & continuing my sketch practice

Life drawing at the Millennium, Sheffield 

Another weekly session at the Life Drawing class in Sheffield helped to crystallize my realization that when drawing men, it's really all about straight lines and angles at first, in order to establish proportions, shapes and angles, together with relationships between all the above to give a framework to the drawings.

The model was quite an older gentleman this time, and quite short.  Again this made for challenging drawing  practice, especially when trying to capture form in the quick 3  x 3 minute sketches

When drawing the female form, then it's not straight lines but all about curves.  These curves have tangents, and they have relationships to proportions and other shapes in the same was as for drawing men, but there is clearly this difference when starting each life drawing, depending on the gender of the subject.


The foreshortened leg caught me out again!.

And I probably over corrected the leg length on the next pose!

The next sketch was better (Left), but the final pose where both legs are foreshortened prooved that I'm not finding negative space and shading properly.  I must practice here!





I've inter-spaced my own earlier studies of the chair and also the drawings copied from the great masters here as I know that my life drawing today took a negative spin.  I was much less impressed with my work this week.  I think I know what I'm doing wrong, but I am finding it hard to apply it when I am under pressure.  This is what life drawing does. - It puts the artist into a different state of anxiety, especially as the mind is not only drawing a nude and has to also deal with all the pre-programmed notions of inhibitions, morals / ethical challenges and so on.  I'm just not removing my mind far enough to truly look at the negative spaces in isolation enough....  I know I can do this, - the chairs and studies below prove it...

It's a bit like setting up the foundations or scaffolding on to which  you can then lay more representative curves and facets.

Finding negative shapes, angles and curves made this chair a good subject to practice on....

  I'm definitely feeling the benefit of these drawing sessions.  I'm  a lot more comfortable now, I've overcome my own barriers, embarrassment and mature inhibitions to seeing a nude subject, and I genuinely feel I am making some slow, but positive, improvement.   My continued used of the Betty Edwards drawing course is also helping, having made a number of drawings recently for this self paced course too as can be seen above, but these are done in the comfort of my own home studio, not on public display like at the gallery!