Life Art Evaluation

When I first received the assignment brief of drawing from observation I was nervous as I have never studied Life Art or been good at drawing people.

I have never been taught how to draw a body before and so was not sure how to approach it but, was shown that using a pencil and counting the number of heads that my thumb spaced when moving down the body, got the right measurements. I would draw a line on a big piece of A2 paper and from then draw the horizontal lines of the head measurements. Before the model arrived in the classroom, students from my class were used as practice with the pencil measurements; this was very useful and gave myself a chance to practice. I enjoyed the task of drawing people from my class and it really helped me for next when the model arrived. She posed in many different positions for 5 minutes at a time so I had to draw quickly yet carefully to get the right proportions. These included; using left hand, not taking my pencil of the page and using a few pens at the same time. At first I found this very hard but soon got used to it. Next, I chose a different media this was charcoal because with charcoal, I feel that I can draw freely and can add shading by using smudges or pushing harder on the page. Sometimes I chose a black paper used white chalk to get a contrast which proved very effective. I wasn't happy about some of my trials as the shapes were wrong and the colours didn’t work out. This was mainly when she was lying down.

I began developing my images. One of my drawings was of her sitting down with her back towards me. As it was very plain I decided that instead I would add interest and make a cubist theme around her for a background. I started by making the shapes and then adding light and dark reds and pink coloured pencils which I really admired. I made another piece in a puzzle format of my cubist drawing with my coloured pencils but realized that I had been using watercolour pencils. Even so, I wanted to see the affect of the light and dark watercolor pencils on my new orange cubist drawings. It lost its cubist effects nevertheless it still looked appealing and surprisingly like silk material.  Looking back, I think that if I were to do another cubist drawing of her back I would use coloured chalk pastel as I love this effect as it is very similar to charcoal in the way of the blending the colours and would be much more successful than watercolour and pencil.

I found a picture in a book that I once bought called ‘step by step cartooning’ in the book showed an image of a man sitting on a chair with his arms on the sides. At first I thought that it was a standard sketch but then whilst looking at it more began to realise that there was barely anything to it as it was a simple line drawing and didn’t even have shading. I was amazed as something with no detail could make such a massive effect. I decided to try this technique with one of the drawings that I sketched of the model. I simplified it to the point where it made sense and then painted it. It wasn't as effective as the one that I saw but I was glad that I tried it out to see what it would look like. I think that the picture looked like Edvard Munch’s work of the scream.

We next went to the Wallace collection for more life art sessions I felt better control when drawing the model as I had had practice and felt more experienced. I feel that my better pieces of work were done there. The model sat down on a chair and a lamp light was exposed to one half of her so to distinguish the light and dark areas. This was my favorite work as it was done mainly using a white chalk pencil on a black piece of card without using dark charcoal or pencil. I really admired this technique and think that sometimes less is more when anticipating the great effect that it had.