This is my second long pose life drawing done at the academy. The first time I attempted a long pose drawing was just after I started at the academy and I barely managed to finish rendering an arm before the time was up. I found all the measuring and the materials to be extremely challenging to use.

A long pose drawing is typically done in two session three hour sessions every week for around twelve weeks in a row at the academy.  Because the techniques used at the academy were so hard for me to adapt I was frustrated because my life drawings were initially looking worse than they used to do with my loose gesture approach to figure drawing. It was especially frustrating since I spent hours and hours working on something that ended up looking worse than something I might have done in ten minutes.

When first starting out with the academic approach with all it’s measuring and attention to detail it’s very easy to loose sight of the larger picture and not notice when the drawing is starting to look wonky before it’s too late.

In the drawing above I felt I was finally getting a little closer to getting comfortable with the tools used at the academy. The drawing was done using carbon pencils on cold press paper.

The rendering on this drawing is far from being finished and it looks very fragmented. The most finished area is the face. One of the teachers did a little demo for me on the lower half of the face to show me how to finish rendering with carbon pencils and I tried to copy his approach on the rest of the face before running out of time.

It’s frustrating spending so much time on a drawing and still have so many mistakes left in it, both in the proportions and in the rendering. But in the end I really felt like I learned a lot while doing this drawing and I’m starting to get a much better understanding of the approach they use at the school.