It is the big summer holidays in Thailand due to the fact that April is the hottest month ever, anywhere in the entire universe, so from March to May the kids are off. My two daughters are quite energetic when they are together and getting excited because they’re coming to mine, even makes them more so, so barring the weekend when they come over to mine in the summer holidays I usually take them one at a time. My 5 year old was practising dancing for the school show so it was my 9 year old’s turn to come over for a few days.
My oldest daughter Angel is very quiet when she’s by herself as I think she actually likes the peace and quiet my gaff has to offer so when I asked her to model for me she didn’t complain, as long as she could go in the bedroom play with her tablet and ‘listen to’ the TV afterwards.
Now the brief for this exercise was to draw a sequence of poses lasting ten minutes each…Adjust the light so it hits only one side of the model, to emphasize the darkest and lightest forms.
I’m afraid on the first drawing, sketching my daughter in her T-shirt only took about 5 or so minutes but then I spent about another ten minutes going overboard with the sofa as I really feel it needed some darker areas. This time the drawing was done on charcoal in my A4 sketch book as I wanted to see how much control I had with this medium on a small size sheet of paper in the given time frame.
My daughters legs are very long and she is quite tall for her age but she looks a lot taller in this drawing, her body should have been shorter.
My second drawing was done on an A2 sheet of paper and again their was too much light shining on her so I filled in some of the background. Now in an earlier exercise we were instructed from the waste, I misjudged this and had to cut the top of her head off. However, I wasn’t going to start again as I really liked the finished drawing, the only problem I had with it was it was all sweeps of dark tone and no hatching.
The third drawing was a lot more satisfying, this time I sat her on the front of the sofa watching the TV with the light directly on her upper-chest region. In ten minutes I managed to get all the drawing done complete with swoops of dark tone and hatching, the only problem I have with it is her calf looks two short, this is because her legs are at an angle which you can tell by the position of her feet but I didn’t do to well with the dark and light to depict this.
Like the third drawing, the fourth drawing was again very satisfying, this time she sat on the corner of the sofa facing away from me, there was more light shining on her but like the last drawing I managed to use a few mark making techniques to build up the different tonal values and this time it actually looked like my daughter. At first I was worried about just drawing 1 leg but then I remembered Degas’s Lying Nude and how the mind fills in the rest.
Moving away from charcoal I decided to do the next drawing in a bluey grey hard pastel to see if I could build up the different tonal values in a not so heavy medium. I had done the last two seated drawings on A3 Paper as it was easier to relate to that size paper with those two seated poses but with this pose I decided to go back to A2 paper as this pose was mostly head and a long back, still I didn’t judge the proportions right and the drawing could have filled more of the paper up.
I went back to charcoal on A2 for the final drawing and if the profile looked anything like my daughter I might have been somewhat satisfied but looking at the second picture then looking at this one you can see how the legs are too short and the head looks big, I’m not sure whether it’s the angIe am at or I started out to broad.
My Drawing Course 