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40 Days of Art: Alternative Life Drawing
I hope I've managed to make some sort of impression on how important life drawing is if you're intending to take art seriously. But life drawing classes can be expensive, and some places don't allow people under 18 to go to nude life drawing classes, so what options are there for a poor high school student who's trying to put together a portfolio to go to animation school?
Well, the same options that are open to everyone, and ought to be employed whether or not you can go to formal life drawing classes.
The first thing you can do – and this goes for everyone, regardless of locale or income level – is to draw people in everyday life. Go somewhere where you are likely to find a crowd of people going about their business and not paying attention to you, and draw whoever you can see. Airports used to be a great place for this as you could stroll up to a gate and hang out there all afternoon, drawing all sorts of people waiting and hurrying and tending children and whatever people do in airports. But those days are rapidly disappearing into the ancient past, so you'll have to find somewhere else that people are similarly occupied. The mall is a good place to start, or a busy shopping district. If you can find a cafe or park bench with a good view of innocent passers-by, you can get hours of material out of it. Public transit is another good place to draw, though you're less likely to get action poses ... still, there are a hundred different ways to sit and read a book, or play on your cell phone, or slump in your seat. It's also a good place to sketch the way clothing plays over a person. If you're still in school, take your sketchbook to the cafeteria or a sporting event. If you live somewhere that has a beach, definitely go there!
One of the benefits this sort of observational sketching has is that you capture people acting naturally – life drawing models do some pretty cool poses, but chances are most of the poses you're going to be called upon to draw will be everyday-life stuff. If you can capture someone's personality in the way they talk on their cell phone or hang on to a pole in the subway, you have an edge on a lot of the competition. Try to find moments that tell a story – the little kid yawning while her mom talks to someone, a lady digging in her purse for a ringing cell phone, a man who's just stepped in some gum – that will teach you a lot about how to create people that feel real on the page (and looks really good in a portfolio, besides).
Draw around the house! Even if you can't get your family to sit and pose for you, you can do the same sort of observational sketches mentioned above, but of the captive subject matter in your home. If you go out for dinner with your friends, sketch the people around the table, and people at other tables if you can do this surreptitiously. And if you or anyone you know have pets, draw them! (I'll be posting another entry on animal life drawing, but this is a start.)
There is a tremendous lot to be learned just from drawing your own good self. I can't tell you mow many hours I spent drawing my own hands and feet. Hands are available all the time and, sometimes with the help of a mirror, you can see them from almost any angle. They can take any number of widely varying positions. You can never have too much practise at drawing hands! Another handy (haha) thing about them is that that they incorporate a lot of the shapes and structures you find elsewhere in the body. You have a good interplay of hard and soft parts, tendons, types of skin, evidence of bones' movement under the skin ... even things like the way your fingers curl, with the bone on the outside and the pads on the inside, mimics in a small way what happens in the legs when they fold.
It can be hard to get a good angle on your feet as they're way down at the bottom of your legs, but as long as you take an analytical approach to what you're drawing and try to understand the forms and functions of how your feet are put together and how they attach to your leg, you can get a good head-start on one of the more challenging aspects of life drawing. It can help (once you get over the squick) to look at your feet as greatly deformed hands – they did evolve from roughly the same sort of limb, after all. Your big toe is a thumb, the arch of the foot is the space along the top of your wrist from the thumb side to pinky side .. you can make the rest of the correlations from there. Being able to draw feet well adds a lot to how you ground a character in their pose, and that in turn can make the difference between greatness and mediocrity in a drawing that's otherwise good.
If you do have any sort of freedom to go to a life drawing class, try your hardest to get there. If there's a college or university near you that has an illustration or fine arts program, they may have extracurricular life drawing that is open to the public. Even little community colleges often have a session you can attend, and local arts groups can have drop-in life drawing for a nominal fee. If all that's available is costumed life drawing, that's great! You'll learn a lot about how clothes work, which is important too.
Well, the same options that are open to everyone, and ought to be employed whether or not you can go to formal life drawing classes.
The first thing you can do – and this goes for everyone, regardless of locale or income level – is to draw people in everyday life. Go somewhere where you are likely to find a crowd of people going about their business and not paying attention to you, and draw whoever you can see. Airports used to be a great place for this as you could stroll up to a gate and hang out there all afternoon, drawing all sorts of people waiting and hurrying and tending children and whatever people do in airports. But those days are rapidly disappearing into the ancient past, so you'll have to find somewhere else that people are similarly occupied. The mall is a good place to start, or a busy shopping district. If you can find a cafe or park bench with a good view of innocent passers-by, you can get hours of material out of it. Public transit is another good place to draw, though you're less likely to get action poses ... still, there are a hundred different ways to sit and read a book, or play on your cell phone, or slump in your seat. It's also a good place to sketch the way clothing plays over a person. If you're still in school, take your sketchbook to the cafeteria or a sporting event. If you live somewhere that has a beach, definitely go there!
One of the benefits this sort of observational sketching has is that you capture people acting naturally – life drawing models do some pretty cool poses, but chances are most of the poses you're going to be called upon to draw will be everyday-life stuff. If you can capture someone's personality in the way they talk on their cell phone or hang on to a pole in the subway, you have an edge on a lot of the competition. Try to find moments that tell a story – the little kid yawning while her mom talks to someone, a lady digging in her purse for a ringing cell phone, a man who's just stepped in some gum – that will teach you a lot about how to create people that feel real on the page (and looks really good in a portfolio, besides).
Draw around the house! Even if you can't get your family to sit and pose for you, you can do the same sort of observational sketches mentioned above, but of the captive subject matter in your home. If you go out for dinner with your friends, sketch the people around the table, and people at other tables if you can do this surreptitiously. And if you or anyone you know have pets, draw them! (I'll be posting another entry on animal life drawing, but this is a start.)
There is a tremendous lot to be learned just from drawing your own good self. I can't tell you mow many hours I spent drawing my own hands and feet. Hands are available all the time and, sometimes with the help of a mirror, you can see them from almost any angle. They can take any number of widely varying positions. You can never have too much practise at drawing hands! Another handy (haha) thing about them is that that they incorporate a lot of the shapes and structures you find elsewhere in the body. You have a good interplay of hard and soft parts, tendons, types of skin, evidence of bones' movement under the skin ... even things like the way your fingers curl, with the bone on the outside and the pads on the inside, mimics in a small way what happens in the legs when they fold.
It can be hard to get a good angle on your feet as they're way down at the bottom of your legs, but as long as you take an analytical approach to what you're drawing and try to understand the forms and functions of how your feet are put together and how they attach to your leg, you can get a good head-start on one of the more challenging aspects of life drawing. It can help (once you get over the squick) to look at your feet as greatly deformed hands – they did evolve from roughly the same sort of limb, after all. Your big toe is a thumb, the arch of the foot is the space along the top of your wrist from the thumb side to pinky side .. you can make the rest of the correlations from there. Being able to draw feet well adds a lot to how you ground a character in their pose, and that in turn can make the difference between greatness and mediocrity in a drawing that's otherwise good.
If you do have any sort of freedom to go to a life drawing class, try your hardest to get there. If there's a college or university near you that has an illustration or fine arts program, they may have extracurricular life drawing that is open to the public. Even little community colleges often have a session you can attend, and local arts groups can have drop-in life drawing for a nominal fee. If all that's available is costumed life drawing, that's great! You'll learn a lot about how clothes work, which is important too.