Life Drawing is just naked people right?

Spring term has sprung at Uni and to get us all back into the swing of it all we're starting back up with our life drawing classes. When I first started uni I had never done a single life drawing class in my life and was so intimidated by it all. Petrified I would be rubbish I went in tentatively, yet I came out of the lesson, having found one of the things I adore most about my course. Life drawing is such a stunning expression of character and mood. As well as being so vital in furthering our studies on how the human body works with its self. During our studies last year I found my initial style in the form of a dip pen. The beautiful, almost illustrative, lines I could create that flowed into each other were satisfying, and I continued this softly blanket style into my second year. Whilst in first term I could get away with this, this term my tutor has really wanted t challenge us to up our creativity and really expand our style. To do this, over two sessions she has made us to draw inspired by Egon Schiele 1890-1918. Schiele's life drawings were highly sexualised and observed from bizarre angles, drawn without the background and any furnishings that the model may be posing on. He experimented with elongating the body using a varying line to draw. In turn creating beautiful and interesting drawings.

Like all our life drawing lessons, Our tutor made us start with a range of quick minute sketches to get back used to drawing. Some of these are my favourites as I try to focus on a zoomed image and not the whole body. I think these become quite full of expression this way. Next we start to draw 5- 10 minute poses to allow us to focus one the whole body. In this session I worked on creating more interesting jagged lines, which is very unlike my typical drawing style. One of the most challenging experiments we did was to first draw our model laying down, then draw another sketch onto op this one when the model had sat up. Whilst seemingly easy, the lines created in the first drawing really confused things and made you really draw what you saw not what you expected to be there. In turn these two compositions are my favourites out of the selection as they are so interesting. The added splash of colour really heightened my work and I look forward to working more in new styles.

#LifeDrawing #University