Here is another batch of figure drawings from this semesters figure drawing class. The first few drawings in this lengthy post are done in pencil. I hadn’t used much pencil in this class before the midterm, and so I wanted to make sure that I got enough practice with pencil in before the semester ended. Drawing and rendering a full figure in two hours in pencil can be very difficult because pencil is such a light, hard medium. Tones have to be built up slowly by hatching, and it is difficult to make changes to a pencil drawing quickly, especially when drawing with a hard pencil.
In order to save time when working in pencil, I like to build up tones in scribbles that follow the contour of the figure. This is faster than hatching or using the side of the pencil, but it still creates a pleasing texture.
For one drawing the class got to work from the same pose for two classes, which allowed much more time to build up the drawing. I decided to use pencil for this two day drawing because I do not typically get the chance to fully and delicately render the figure in pencil because it takes so much time.
Below is that two-class pencil drawing. We were also encouraged to add in an invented background, which is something that we didn’t get the chance to do very often because of time constraints.
These next two drawings were done in charcoal. I really like the way that these two drawings came out. Unlike with pencil, charcoal is quick to build up and because it is only loosely adhered to the page, changes are easily made. However, these drawings were made with two different kinds of charcoal, which do behave differently. The one on the left was made with vine charcoal, which is a super soft, fine, light, ghostly medium. The picture on the right was made with hard charcoal sticks and charcoal pencil, which can still be manipulated, but much less so than vine charcoal. Charcoal pencil is darker than vine charcoal and lends itself to a more linear drawing.
