Around three years ago, I decided that if I was ever going to get better at drawing the human figure, I was going to have to practice it a lot.
The best way to do this was to find myself a life drawing group and I managed to stumble across a great group not far from my place that meet every Wednesday night for around 2 1/2 hours, drawing poses ranging from 3 minutes to 15-17 mins.
That first night I really didn’t know what the hell I was doing and was a little intimidated by some of the drawing skills on show (everyone else seemed to be either fine artists or commercial illustrators). Thankfully there was no ego amongst the other participants and everyone was happy to give helpful advice where they could.
The model on that first night was named Claire and while we tend to rotate through a small number of regular models, this was the only time that I had drawn Claire – that was up until just recently when she reappeared after a lengthy hiatus.
Having a period of close to three years between sessions allowed me to compare the work from that first night and my recent life drawing work see if the continual practice was indeed paying off.
Each of these comparative images were drawn from a 15 minutes pose and I’m happy to see some definite improvement over the time.
It can feel sometimes like you are spinning your wheels and seemingly getting nowhere so it is a good exercise to go back and compare your current work to some of your earlier pieces, if for no other reason than to take pride in your hard earned growth which goes a long way to further inspire your future endeavours.
