Life Drawing - Choose Your Tool's!!

This lesson we finally got to choose the materials that we wanted to draw our observations in, I first decided to draw on the tablets again, even though I'm not into in the whole graphics/animation thing I really liked using it last week and I also just liked the look of the final sketches. 

I found drawing the legs on these next two a bit difficult - for some reasons legs were being a pain this week - but it was all due to foreshortening and that was something that I do need to keep practicing and also I need to keep remembering to measure the figure to get it in the right proportions.

This was my best drawing on the tablet of the day - I think compared to all the others I did this was in proportion and I was able to draw the pose well! 

Chalk and Charcoal Sketches

After using the tablet I was reminded that I should now be doing drawings that should be tailored to my specific subject pathway - so after a quick think I decided to do the rest of the sessions observations in chalk and charcoal. This is because I've looked at Renaissance artist sketches before (Da Vinci, Botticelli and Raphael) and so I thought using charcoal and chalk would be more tailored to my Art History pathway.

Raphael

Botticelli

"Adoration of the Magi Character Study," by Da Vinci, 1481.

 My first sketch with charcoal didn't go to well, and then I had to pull myself back out of the way I have been used to drawing and remember how much better my sketches looked when we used chalk first in the observations to get the highlights and then used the charcoal. 

The second sketch was a lot better since this time I started with the highlights and then worked backwards, again it surprised me how much easier it was to draw with it - also the sketches looked better without the complete black outline, by using the chalk just softens the observations and improved how I drew the figure.

This was the pose that gave me the most trouble and that leg on the left... don't get me started! It took me a good 5 minutes to properly draw the perspective of the leg, I managed to get it in he end but I didn't get it just quite. 

What I need to set a target for is to improve drawing hands and feet in better detail, because they really suck and need some serious improvement.