Figure Sculpture ZBrush

I've just started Scott Eaton's Figure Sculpture course and this is the result of the first week's assignment.

My latest project

LARA Drawings

One weeks charcoal drawing of Magda at LARA studio in London.

One weeks cast drawing in pencil.

Since I got back from Italy I've started going to a 4h long life drawing session each week down in Leith here in Edinburgh. It's really great because they have two models, one that stays in one pose for the whole session, except for some short poses in the beginning, and the other model does short poses throughout the whole session. Here are two of my drawings I've done the last couple of weeks, one in charcoal and one smaller pencil drawing.

First drawing back in the UK

So I'm back in the UK again....actually I'm up in lovely Edinburgh and this is my first drawing since I came home from the Florence Academy of Art. It's a smaller and shorter figure study than the monster drawings we did at the FAA, but all the same it was a lot of fun. I managed to find a really nice quality paper up here in Edinburgh made in Someset. It's smoother than the Fabriano Roma paper that I'm used to and therefore more suitable for this kind of smaller drawings with a smaller portrait. It's supposedly grey....that was it said on the label but it looks more yellow to me. Since I really like drawing with both chalk and charcoal I might try to dye some paper for my next drawing to get a darker shade of grey.
I used a photo as reference for this drawing since I don't really have the funding yet to hire a model 8) But I have actually managed to find a life drawing class up here in Edinburgh that have 4h poses, so I'm really looking forward to going to that!

Last drawing of the year at the FAA

This is the second drawing of my third trimester at the FAA and my last in Florence. It's on toned Archers paper and drawn with chalk and charcoal as a change from my previous charcoal drawings that have all been on white Roma paper. It's been so much fun to draw with both light and dark.

Charcoal drawing - Claudia

On Friday I finished another 5 week charcoal figure study....and here it is. Sometimes you get models that move a lot and sometimes you get models like Claudia who doesn't move at all even in a difficult position. I mean you have to allow for some twisting and similar, but in general Claudia has been so good. If anyone's wondering how she managed to hold her hands like that for 75h, she had them resting in loops of fishing line hanging from the ceiling.

This drawing, similar to my last one of Alberto, has a lot of direct light and not many shadow shapes. I found this incredibly challenging, since the shapes of the halftones are so diffuse and they change a lot depending on lighting conditions, movement of the model etc. If you have a lot of dark shadow shapes you tend to be able to see the forms faster and then you simply soften edges or leave them harder to distinguish what form you want. When you only deal with halftones though, it's basically like just dealing with the outlines and the transitions and therefore it's so much slower and more difficult to see the forms. I apprached this drawing in a different way to my last though and I think it worked a lot better for me. I found that if I applied a light layer of charcoal everywhere and then erased out the absolute lightest parts, instead of trying to leave the lightest parts by simply drawing around them, I managed to wrap my head around the shapes much easier. I don't know why this worked so much better for me, since it's pretty much the same thing but it just did.