Life Drawing Week 8 (Drawing Dirk the Daring, Madam Mim, and Pinocchio.

Week 8 Life Drawing

This week's Life Drawing Homework was a challenge. A lot more complexity is required when drawing Pinocchio, Dirk the Daring and Madam Mim as opposed to Winnie the Pooh or Spheres in perspective. It's for this reason that I feel I've not really completed the requested task.

Reflection on the Task:

Essentially, I can't get the correct shapes of the characters I'm trying to draw. My attempts to draw Pinocchio, for example, were flawed because I don't really understand the shapes that I'm dealing with. I especially struggled with his chin and his shoulders, because I couldn't tell how the shapes actually work. In the below image, it's visible that I don't quite get it.

(Mike gave me some feedback, and told me to think of it as a human skull that was rounded out. I think this will help me in next week's homework.

Attempting to understand the Shapes that make up Pinocchio, showing that I have problems with complicated shapes.

I also tried to get faster at drawing the characters, since I tended to take upwards of ten minutes to get a simple shape down. This is what I was attempting below. The main Issue here is consistency, but I think I did make progress in terms of speeding up and drawing more efficiently. Hopefully this will help me in the future in the Life Drawing class.

Dirk the Daring and Mad Madam Mim

In the process of preparing for the Life Drawing class this week, I tried a couple things. Firstly, I tried to imitate the character poses on the character sheets. Secondly, I drew poses of the characters from their respective animations (Sword in the Stone and Dragon's Lair), to try and get a greater sense of the movement and shapes.Finally, I tried drawing my own poses for the characters, to limited success.

Madam Mim was the easiest for me to draw, even though I think that I didn't capture her face properly, since it morphs from drawing to drawing.

The Madam Mim character had the simplest shapes, so I didn't have very much trouble with her. I still think consistency is an issue though.

With Dirk, My problem was, once again, perspective. when drawing him in a flat pose, I can generally get the shapes right, but when he starts reaching forward of backwards, the realism is lost, and the drawing flattens out.

 I hope that in the class I will be able to better undestand how these characters work by drawing them from an actual person. I am nervous about the next class though, since I feel like I won't be able to keep up with the class. When I try and draw these characters on my own, it can take far longer than the 5 minutes required in the Life Drawing room.

In-Class Life Drawing Reflection:

In class, I think that I had a few interesting revelations. The following is a summary of the class. We started off with straightforward life drawing, and then Mike challenged us to draw with our non-dominant hand. After that, we drew the male model as Dirk the Daring.

In the warm up, I feel like I drew a few decent poses of the model, and then got too focused on getting the shapes right that the drawings died. I feel like the best drawings I was making were ones that stayed simple and logical. I started to struggle as per usual, and that's when Mike gave me some tips. He suggested I try drawing the shape of the model's legs and then drawing the circles that make up the model's body. By drawing that action first, I kept the drawings alive, and although I don't think I was successful after the tip, I got a sense of why I was struggling. I was drawing what I was seeing, not the movement behind it.

This is the Moment where mike told me to draw action first, and the left is his attempt at drawing with his opposite hand.

This realization was furthered when he suggested we all try drawing with the opposite hand. I actually drew as well with my right hand as my left hand, and it made me realise that when I draw with my dominant hand, I add a lot of unnecessary flourishes and shapes that don't need to be there. With my right hand, I kept things simple because of the shakiness of my hand, and the result was that I drew the basics of the drawing more effectively.

Finally, the most enjoyable part of the class was drawing Dirk. I think this accomplished the same thing as drawing with my other hand. I drew simply, but expressively, and the result was a more lively drawing. I think that I need to see the human body as simpler shapes, and just try and draw them. Then, perhaps, I will improve in my drawing abilities.

I think I got some good perspective on this image with his legs.