Week 3: Proportion

As identified through previous exercises, proportion can be one of my biggest weaknesses, so I was both excited and apprehensive coming into this week's class. However I knew it was important in order to improve, and I had to stop being nervous of producing 'bad' drawings!!

We began by looking at measuring techniques for drawing proportions correctly. This was something I remembered from previous life drawing classes, but hearing it again was helpful at refreshing it in my mind and applying it to the current model. Measuring the head size on a pen or pencil, with one eye closed, could then be translated to your paper in relation the size of the head you drew. You could use the pencil to measure the number of heads tall the body was, and then again translate that to your paper using the size of the head you've drawn.

Throughout the session this was very useful in many ways, one of the most obvious for me being the positioning of the figure on the page. The first two drawings are slightly off centre but you can see in the later three that the figure becomes very centralised, which is an improvement from last week's session! It also helped me with sizing different parts of the body in relation to one another, although this was definitely not 100% successful especially in the early drawings but kept me learning as I went through.

30 MINS / 4H PENCIL 

30 MINS / CHARCOAL

Later I began to learn that drawing circular shapes and lines across the figure helped me in visualising the positions and angles of joints and planes of the body, and resulted in more realistic and balanced posture. The posture in my early drawings can be seen as somewhat lopsided, as one issue I found was drawing the way the weight was balanced in the stance. Therefore the figure sometimes looks like it is leaning. I am pleased that looking through the drawings a clear improvement can be seen between the first two drawings, which were 30 minutes, and my final 1 hour study. All but one of the drawings are standing poses, but it is only the final one which achieves a balanced posture, which demonstrates what I identified as an issue and worked on improving during the class.

FIRST ATTEMPT AT THIS 30 MIN POSE // RESTARTED DRAWING

SECOND ATTEMPT AT 30 MIN POSE / 4H PENCIL

I STILL THINK THIS TORSO IS MOST SUCCESSFUL, BUT THE LEGS LET IT DOWN

 The final drawing also seems to be the most accurate in its proportions, and although I still have some work to do I am a lot more confident going into week 4 having seen some progress.

1 HOUR TOTAL / 3B PENCIL