Life Drawing: Which Drawing Method?

I was all over the place today while drawing. I’m still struggling with which drawing method I should use, each one has its positives and negatives but I need to pick something because tonights life drawing session was all over the board.

At least the warmup page didn’t change…

Too much focus on detail with my gesture drawings, these are not really gestural at all.

This drawing turned out really well. I like this drawing style a lot, and it works well with my brain. I start at the top and work my way down slowly building correct drawing onto the previous correct drawing. So I like it, and it produces a good looking drawing most of the time, but the problem is that it’s hard to place the figure correctly on the page and there is a big chance that the proportions can be far from accurate.

Here is a good example of the same drawing method as before but with bad proportions.

This drawing was more than frustrating. I started with the same drawing method I was using on Saturday where I mark the absolute top and bottom of the figure first, measure the head height as it would fit within this space and then begin drawing the head. After spending a ton of time on getting the head wrong multiple times, I got fed up and began venting my frustration by pressing the charcoal hard into the page while not really caring how the drawing turned out.

With this method I started by doing a very light simple block in of the whole figure to get the placement down. The block in was literally a few boxes and straight lines barely indicating anything but it gave a general idea of placement and size relationships. After the block in I started with the head and began working exactly while at the same time incorporating value. I’m not sure if I like this drawing method much at all because it relies on shading too much, which can mask bad drawing.

This was the same method as before, but the portrait was taking very long so I didn’t get much of the figure done.

Life Drawing: Which Drawing Method?, Post Inspiration

The lines of a few of my drawing tonight reminded me of the nervous looking lines created by Egon Schiele.

Here is another drawing method to add to the list, I have always liked this idea but it turned out to not be very practical in a lot of situations. It’s the “Site size” method.