another attempt at life drawing

these are from my second attempt at life drawing. as you can see, we had a female model the second time around. i found it harder than the first time. i had a lot more trouble letting go and freeing up my hand for the lines. kind of disconcerting that the best ones were the ones i did blind (not looking down at the paper) or mostly blind. that was the closest i came to letting go. i'm going to a yoga thing on sunday, so i'll miss this weekend's sunday morning life drawing session. looking at these results, maybe that's for the best.

trying something new: life drawing

yesterday, i tried out croquis/life drawing for the first time. it's never really appealed to me before because i consider myself someone who doesn't draw people.

our local art group has started up a regular søndagscroquis here in the new year, ever other week, so i decided i'd go along to support it. i was surprised to find that i quite liked it.

as you can see, we had a male model. he was tall, middle-aged and totally naked. it was amazing how quickly you forget about that and just look for the shapes and the lines, sketching quickly. we did a number of exercises - warming up in the start with him changing position every 30 seconds, hence some of these pages having several versions on one page.

i actually liked the quick changing of positions better than when he posed for longer. i found that i couldn't keep drawing him in the same position for 10 minutes. or even 5. one minute was about right for me.

i think that all those horses i drew as a kid served me well in looking for the shapes and proportions. i don't think i ever completely let go of any tension i felt about drawing a person, but i stepped in that direction and i will definitely be going back again in two weeks.