Life drawing, week 3

We arrived last week to find the room set up with plumb lines, and slides of our work from the previous class playing on the screen -

This session was going to be about measurement - but first some quick gesture drawings to warm up with -

the final one a longer pose, checking the relation of things, eg the slope of the shoulders, the relation of the chin to the body below - and using those plumb lines -

It's all about seeing what's there, not drawing what you expect to see. Which is especially difficult with bodies, because we have such an ingrained concept of them. It's about ruthlessly changing your original drawing, too.

Some artists got obsessed with working from measurements, Euan Uglow perhaps being the prime example, measuring constantly and joining the dots as the final step. If you look closely at this picture by Uglow, or this one, you can see the measurement marks. It could take him three years to finish a painting. Giacometti could do the measurement thing too - have a look at Portrait of Annette here.

Our final pose was longer and involved lots of measuring and checking -

Looking at it a few days later, I can see that I should have measured the elbow better, and the proportions of the face.

Some people found working from measurements really helpful; others not.