Drawing from Life

With the vast majority of my artwork I am working from a selection of photographs but it is still important part of art education to get out there and do some drawings from life. These can be much more difficult to do as it is easy for perspective and lighting to change whilst drawing and in terms of animals they can very easily just get up and move, leaving your sketch permanently in limbo.

When I was studying art in college drawing from life took 2 forms: still lifes and life drawing (of human models). It can be hard to know where to begin with life drawing but tips we were given were to not worry about what we were doing, never to erase the marks we made, and to work FAST. And it was fast, we were given time periods of 60 seconds, 30, and 10. Giving yourself these short time limits is a great way of getting started. 

Something else that's useful when drawing live animals is to do focus on drawing when the animal is at rest. This is what I did of my dog and here are the results. 

Don't expect to finish your sketches though, it's very easy for a shift in position or something to happen (a sudden noise or someone walking by) that mean that you cannot continue the same drawing. Working from life is more about building up as much as you are able to in order to convey what you are seeing. 

Drawings really do feel more 'alive' when sketches from life!

Sketching Emma

I thought this week I'd let you see some sketching, using my other dog, Emma so that you can see the process I like to use.

First a photo - thankfully a ball works as a good distraction.

Using the photographic reference I faintly mark key parts of the portrait such as the proportions of the eyes and nose, to make sure to get an accurate likeness. Then I use a soft pencil, in this case a 4B and work on the darkest parts.

I then lighten the pressure to do blocks of dark shading. The sketchbook I work on creates a nice texture to the shading.

I then switch to a harder pencil such as a HB to do the lighter areas of shading.

After a few adjustments here and there the sketch is done! A larger version is available to see here.

I tried to get the model to pose with her picture- proved more difficult than I thought!