Life-drawing, January 2024

On Friday and Saturday I finally restarted the life-drawing thread of my artistic practice after a break since November.

Rather than doing several drawings in each session as I have done before, I decided to concentrate on a single pose spread across several thirty minute sittings punctuated by short breaks to allow the model (and me!) to stretch and let their muscles recover from unnatural enforced stillness.

So the weekend has produced two drawings, one from Friday and one from Saturday - the same pose in each, but with a different model and a different medium. I chose the pose for multiple reasons - it fits nicely on A2 paper in landscape orientation, it has limbs going off in different directions, and it’s viable for a life-model to hold for sustained periods.

The Nazgûl sword was brought along to Saturday’s life-drawing session by the model as a prop, and fitted with the pose as well as adding another strong diagonal to the composition!

I’m still torn between the two media - I really like the warmth of the sanguine pencil (it’s a Faber-Castell Pitt oil base pencil), but the oil content in it means that I can’t get the tonal variation from it that I can get from graphite pencils. I’ve just ordered myself some oil-free Lyra “Rembrandt” sanguine chalk pencils to see if they’re better for the type of marks I want to make.