This is the first time I have spent an allocated hour on drawing a figure, and also on a larger scale. Because of lockdown I wasn’t able to have access to a live model, so I had to resource reference models from the internet. This wasn’t a problem, but it wasn’t ideal to the true experience of drawing from life.
I used an image from a youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6cLTWnbeOc&t=1318s, as a pose and decided to work the piece in charcoal and see how far I could get with the detail before the hour was up.
I took to the contrast of the light and shade of the back of the model, the shape of the spine and the diagonal movement of the body. To me it seemed a defensive, yet provocative pose, which I found interesting, almost a juxtaposition of how the model was feeling.
Starting with slight marks to place the space from head to toe, I usually work from the head downwards, but with this pose I grounded it with the chair first and drew around that with the buttocks, and spanned the limbs out from that, drawing in the spine towards the head. Not something I usually do, but I realize some poses should originate from the centre of attention and radiate out. I found it easier to build the drawing up in this way.
After sketching in the outline I worked some charcoal powder in the background and started to sketch in the lines and build up the shades and tones of the back and spine.
From this stage I uses a brush to soften the charcoal, and start to add highlights with a white conte stick, adding, brushing, erasing, adding, brushing, until I got a smooth contour of the planes of the shapes and skin.
Towards the end of the hour I started to speed up with the shading which gave the softness away to a more vigorous mark. As apparent on the back and spine, I kind of liked the effect, giving it a more earthy expression, in contrast to the soft lighter hues of the top side of the model where the light is more prevalent.
I enjoyed working in charcoal for this study, and give me another hour or so I could have worked in a lot more detail. Looking back over the final piece with regards to proportion, the right hip, between the right elbow and the twist of the leg seems to be a bit elongated and the left arm behind the torso also seems a bit longer than it should be, but apart from that I think the general flow of the pose was portrayed quite well. There was a nice diagonal line flowing from the head, down towards the right hand side, towards the feet.
Eeyanski Arts 