WEEK 1: Introduction to Life Drawing

Introduction to Life Drawing

In our first session of Drawing for Animators and Illustrators we did speed life drawing, which was very interesting exercise. I've always wanted to try proper life drawing, but never was able to find willing model, so this was very rewarding experience. I'm going to go over all my drawings one by one.

I was very afraid at the beginning to actually draw someone sitting in front of me, because if there's one thing I know about my drawing skills it's that I can't properly draw human faces so that they resemble the actual person. However, it's a skill I'm trying to improve and there is no better way to improve than to try again and again and again. 

Thanks to this exercise I found that there are many things I still need to improve, for example, I need to learn the proportion of a face, so that it looks right. The person in this picture looks more like a drawn character, rather than a real person. 

The next task was to draw another person in front of you, having half the time and using charcoal. Since charcoal is definitely not my tool of choice, i was quite wary with using it. I feel like charcoal is such a strong tool, you can't easily repair your mistakes like you can with pencil, so it makes your mistakes more prominent. Which is actually good, in some ways

Drawing the same person with even more limited amount of time and again using charcoal was even bigger challenge. But it made me realize how many things you can draw in such a short time (which will be evident in the next challenge). 

Using continuous line with charcoal while doing blind drawing is one of the most challenging things I've ever drawn. Especially considering the fact that it was just in 10 seconds. You obviously can't draw much in that time, but it is kind of eye-opening to see what you can draw in 10 seconds. 

 It's very helpful to draw the same person using the same techniques, so that you can actually see how you improved with just one drawing, because you can see in the first picture the mistakes you make on your first try. It's easier to avoid those mistakes next time you draw using these techniques. 

Even though we were able to look at our picture the second time around, I still feel kind of acomplished to see that the second drawing of the same person came out way better than the first attempt.

The task was to draw our partner with our non-dominant hand. It was deffinitely not easy to come out of my comfort zone and draw with hand I'm not confident in using. But it made me realize that with lots and lots of practice I could even work with my non-dominant hand if I used it a lot during my practices, which would come in handy in the future. The use of different tools while using the same approach (non-dominant hand) was definitely nice change, I could see which medium suits me the most (brush pen) of those two and which one of those two should I improve at.

The task was to draw the person using small strokes, be it cross-hatching, small brushes, dots. As long as it wasn't long continuous line or strokes longer than a 1cm, we could use it. I enjoyed mixing two completely different tools, fine liners of various sizes and charcoal stick. I realized that using different techniques can make you see the person in a different light (especially if it's a person that was drawn before).

Drawing people's profile always seemed like such a hard task for me. However using the sillhouette technique helped out a lot in learning about the structure of the face. I had a bit of difficulties with the line profile as it wasn't up to my expectations, but the next attempt, using the sillhouette technique came out way better than i expected.

The technique is not about making the outline and then filling it in. It's about sketching and filling the space and continuously adding shapes to the sillhouette to make it look like the person sitting in front of you. It was definitely educational using this way of drawing profile, because if something didn't seem right you could always add up to the sillhouette to make it look more like you would see in front of you.

The last drawing was definitely one of my favourites. I enjoyed combining different techniques we were taught during the lesson and different tools to portray the person. As this was the final piece of our session, I wanted to make the most of it and tried adding subtle colour to work with the shadow and light. Somewhere I used bold dark lines with brush pen, somewhere I used cross-hatching to show the material. Definitely enjoyed making those people look a bit more comic book, retro style. It was very helpful experience to try so many new techniques and try to work with different media and using different approach to it.