Figure Studies

I managed to make it out to my first life-drawing session last night. The weather had turned nasty -- we were in the midst of a minor snowstorm. The person running the session hadn't expected many people to show, but there were about 10 of us there.

I'm not sure what I was expecting. Nude people, certainly. While I've drawn nudes before, they have always been of people I knew and felt comfortable with. This was my first time working in a more professional setting. I wondered whether I'd feel comfortable with it. I shouldn't have worried. I was far too busy working my ass off for the next three hours to notice anything. I did worry about whether all the other people in the class were awesome artists and I was just some jumped-up, self-taught art monkey. But of course people varied in skill level, style, and even what skill they were concentrating on (one guy was only working on faces). So I fit right in. I'll feel a lot better about going to the next class, I think.

I tend to work with pencils (charcoal -- so! messy!), and I tend towards the harder end of the pencil spectrum.

But anyway, here's a few scans from yesterday's session. We had two models, so the gestures were a bit longer than they would usually be, I think.

3-minute poses:



5-minute pose:



15-minute pose:



The better of the two 30-minute poses:



And the last pose of the evening, a 10-minute pose:



I think that last one turned out much more lively than the first few sets. I found the faces to be quite difficult to draw in general because of the way the light fell on them. All in all, though, I was quite pleased with my work once I got warmed up. I'm sorta looking forward to the next class... in that way that one looks forward to a rewarding but challenging workout.