I’ve been striving to frequent more figure drawing meet-ups this year, to continue honing this craft. In a march I went to two different events. Here are the results:

Day 1: “Long Poses”

2-40 minute drawings with a professional dancer as the model.

Medium: Conté sticks and dry pastel sticks on tonned paper.

Day 2: “Medium Poses”

1-20 minute drawings with a martial-arts practitioner as the model.

Medium: Digital drawings done on the Procreate app using ‘6B’ and a custom ‘marker’ brushes.

I am surprised that after almost a year without practice, my work-quality didn’t drop as drastically as I thought! I was expecting to be quite rusty and not get very good results. I guess the years and years of practice did pay off. Of course, I struggled with these and I see a lot of room for improvement, but it’s nice to see my progress.

Overall, I am happy to go back to this live-drawing practice; it is one of the most effective ways to improve my drawing skills, combining anatomy, composition, dynamism, realism and efficiency training.

In the future I want to practice the “polishing phase” of my drawings to achieve as much realism as possible in a more efficient way. For that to happen, I also need to continue improving my eye for anatomy and proportions. With a good base, the finishing touches come together a lot more easily.

I also love playing with different materials – it is what keeps the practice fresh and exciting for me. This year I’d like to experiment with paints and wet mediums, which I haven’t explored much yet.

One challenge I want to overcome is dealing with small shifts and movements of the model that can change up the whole pose over time. One thing I’ve been trying to do is notice which muscles are most tense at the beginning of the pose and avoid focusing too much on those right away, waiting until the body is relaxed and grounded before moving into details. This helps me avoid overworking areas that are likely to shift and makes the overall drawing feel more stable. I’ve also been paying attention to weight-bearing portions of the body and emphasizing line weight there to better convey a sense of balance and gravity.

As always, I will keep you posted on how things progress and continue sharing my explorations.

Thanks for following along and happy crafting!