Live Drawing

For our week 3 practical we did "live drawing."  Armed with our sketchbooks we were sent outside in to the big wide world to sketch the people of Dundee in their natural habitats.  The aim was to focus less on realism and more on emphasising the personality of the subject.
I found this task really frustrating for the first hour.  I began with fine liner pens as my chosen medium however I felt my work was becoming too messy and scribbly with all the mistakes I was making. Though messy work wasn't really an issue with this task I was very aware of the scratchy, sketchy lines I was making when I was supposed to making fluid, deliberate line work.  I switched to using pencil and tried to focus on doing this and made a conscious effort to not obsessively rub out every line I made that I didn't deem "perfect."  When I was more confident with my work I switched back to pen and I much prefer these results as the line work appears more natural.

I really wanted to focus on the character of whoever I was drawing, so I focused on what their pose and facial expression communicated to me.  I tried to subtly use shapes and exaggerated proportion to aid me in this aim as in character design, particularly in animation it seems, certain shapes in a character's body convey different meanings (for instance square heads = stupidity*.)  With this in mind I kept detailed features minimal in order to emphasise the pose and emotion and in this aspect I feel I was somewhat successful.

Although these are supposed to be quick sketches I need to focus more on capturing the entire figure as a lot of the drawings are head or half-body shots.  This also made it difficult to capture the movement of the figure as many of the subjects in my sketches appear static when they were actually in motion.  Though I do feel I am becoming more comfortable with my line work, in tasks such as this it would definitely benefit from being more crisp/deliberate and, to an extent, less sketchy.  This would help me sketch quicker and perhaps help me illustrate motion better as a result.  I also need to work on drawing people from difficult perspectives as I found myself choosing to draw figures I saw from easy, standard angles.

All in all I really enjoyed the task.  I particularly enjoyed focusing on the personality rather than realism.  Though next time I think I'll use a smaller sketchbook...  A3 is a bit unwieldy when you're trying to be subtle.


*Not that I'm calling anyone stupid or anything, ahhhhh.