Figure drawing first time

Last weekend I attended my first ever figure drawing class. 

Apart from landscape, figure drawing is one of the artistic skills I want to pursue and one I’m most impressed with. But it takes a lot of skill to do it well.

I attended a workshop at the City Academy in London, the studio was located near Leicester Square Tube Station.

Over a few hours, the class was taught different ways to represent the form of to practice.

Blind drawing where you focus on the model, not the paper your using.

Wrapping lines where you draw lines around the shape to suggest the volume. Imagine you are wrapping bandages around the form, like an Egyptian mummy.

Also, a practice that looks at the three masses in a body. The ribcage, pelvis and head and how the fir together to make the form.

Instead of the usual linework, we looked at using mass and a silhouette to represent the form, then outlines over it. 

It was an introduction into the different ways a figure can be visualised and drawn. 

As for my effort, I did better than expected. True there are some issues with proportions being wrong, measurements incorrect here and there. But that sort of accuracy comes with practice. 

I’m looking forward now to take some more classes, a formal setting where I can learn from another artist and sharpen up my skills. 

The materials I used are pencils

• Charcoal
• Chalk
• Graphite/Carbon Pencils. Staedtler Lumograph black Pencils. HB, 4B, 8B
• Wolff’s Carbon Pencils by Royal Sovereign, 4B, 6B
• Sugar paper

It was tougher drawing for all that time, surprisingly tiring. But I wanted to experience a figure drawing class before I attended a course in figure drawing. Just to give myself an idea of what it would be like.

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