Study group - figure 5 ways 1

It’s a new month and a new topic for the Love Life Drawing study group. The new topic: drawing the figure with five different approaches. We have practiced each of these, so this acts as a review, a kind of synthesis, and a way of highlighting if any of the stages needs more work.

We took a single reference image and drew it in multiple phases.

1. Gesture: broad, simple curves designed to capture the spirit of the figure in a few basic lines
2. Values: an attempt to capture the play of light and shadow across the forms
3. Simple shapes: represent the figure with simplified geometric forms and some contour lines to show direction
4. Anatomy: what are the underlying bones, muscles, and fat doing to make up this figure?
5. Figure: bring it all together

My gesture, simple shapes, and anatomy drawings all look pretty good. The gesture one surprises me because I still don’t understand why I might do one of those, but perhaps relaxing my expectations let me loosen up a bit. The simple forms drawing looks nice; some of my better contour lines. The anatomy drawing is probably the best of the whole set, which is weird because I definitely faked my way through it.

Using shadows to highlight forms is my clear weak point. I’m not sure yet how to go about fixing that, but perhaps this month will give me guidance on that front. I wonder if taking a different approach than Kenzo’s hard and soft lines and strong terminators will work better for me.