Life Drawing- Observational drawing (Week 3)

This week as we were absent from university to attend our student advise sessions, we had missed our scheduled time within our life drawing in class. However Sarah our lecturer had assigned us some observational drawing tasks to keep us up to date with our work and to encourage us to reach outside our comfort zones and draw things on television or within everyday life. For my life drawing task I decided to do some observational studies of real life characters from movies and television sport shows.

As I was so close the television and was able to pause the show and get a really good view of the characters emotions, facial details and their body language. I was able to spend more time drawing the model which I had choose and was able to really pay attention to their small details including eyes, mouths, nose and even little distinctive marks such as beauty marks or wrinkles. This was a different drawing to what I was previously able to do within university as the models tend to hold their poses at a much shorter time, position themselves within different angles and be further away where only the body, hands and head can be present for detail. I really enjoyed this task and thought it was great that we were still encouraged to practice and continue our life drawing skills.

The first three sets of my observations were from a Christmas movie, I decided to watch and draw anything that had caught my interest. The first observation was the lead female character in a moment of exhaustion and worry. I quickly drew this and then added more detail during the movie.

The second drawing was the male lead character and I had observed the character taking a moment to pause and almost to be in a world of their own.

The third and final drawing I captured was the friend of the female character. What I like about all of my observations is the story you could almost imagine from each of the characters reactions and body language. I had observed them all within a state of mind or during a action and felt like for a quick ten minute drawing I had gathered the details, attitude and personality of the characters and their performance within the movie.

The last drawing I decided to change up my observation and draw a full length drawing of someone within the sports world. I decided to draw a baseball player and observe his actions as he was in the middle of walking from pitch to pitch. Now I don’t really know that much about baseball and how the sport is played, but it was interesting so observe this man in such a calm and relaxing behaviour. I quickly drew this drawing after a game had just began and a pitcher had thrown his first ball, everyone was running and the ball had been caught and a point had been won. It almost seemed within seconds that this hype that everyone was expressing vanished and it was quickly back to normal and on with the game.