Life Drawing class, second week.

We had another young woman for our model at this week's class, and she presented us with quite a challenge in a variety of poses.  She told us she is also a life drawing teacher, as well as modelling, so she knows what we need to make us work harder on drawing figures.  I thoroughly enjoyed this session, and feel like I'm getting to know the other students as we discuss each other's sketching.  I haven't got around to photographing my sketches yet, but hope to get it done and posted here over the weekend.

 Edited 31.7.15 to add sketches for second week.  I haven't included all the sketches I did last week, as I wasn't happy with some of them.  Even these aren't great, but they are the best of an average lot!  The brown pastel sketch is very disappointing; the model had her hair pinned up and despite my attempts to fix this picture, the figure still looks like a boy apart from the breasts.  The version in pencil wasn't quite so bad for some reason.  I was happier when she let her hair down for the long pose, which I did in blue pastel.

Colouring in books for adults.

The term 'adult colouring books' always makes me smile, as people who don't know about them sometimes raise their eyebrows, thinking this could be some kind of pornographic material!  But of course it is not, I have been buying colouring books for a few years now, but it is only very recently that the idea of adults "colouring in" like we all did as kids, has taken off in a big way.  It's mostly to do with relaxation and stress relief therapy, although I don't look at it that way.  Being a bit on the artistic side, I just love painting and colouring in for its own sake!
I bought these today at the Craft & Quilt Fair, and will post photos of the other ones in my collection later.

Life Drawing Co-op 16.7.2015

Today was the first day of my 10 week Life Drawing class at the Eltham Living & Learning Centre.  We have a live model but no regular tutors.  A co-ordinator explains the timing for the model and we use whichever medium we like to draw or paint the model.  I chose graphite and charcoal today, and briefly played with watercolour.  Over the coming weeks I will experiment with pastel, watercolour, acrylic and colour pencil.
As you will see I have a long way to go in improving my perspective and anatomy of the human figure, but at the end of 10 weeks (with some practice inbetween time) I hope to be a lot better!
The first 9 sketches were warm up sketches, where the model changed her pose every two minutes. I did mine on an A5 sketch pad.

The last two were the final drawings where the model held her pose for about half an hour each time.
 These were done on an A3 sketch pad.