Life drawing, week 4

Well, what were we in for?

First, a slideshow of how artists such as Rembrandt, Kollewitz, Piranesi, Caravaggio, Georges de la Tour had used shadow to great effect. Even quick, inaccurate drawing is a good way to remember (and so, in my opinion, is carefully copying another artist's work, as an exercise for noticing what they do, and speculating on why) -

Then, two drawings of the highly lit model and the shadows cast. Choose one to use later...

Then we covered a sheet of paper with charcoal, and were shown how to rub out, and add back charcoal and also black chalk and white chalk. Before the model came back we rubbed out the white areas from our drawing. I got very confused about what was where when doing this, and got rather frustrated with the entire drawing. When she came back and we could draw from "reality" again, that was better, but by now I felt I'd lost control of the drawing and spent a bit of time looking around at everyone working away -

Then, as it didn't matter any more, I got bold with adding the black chalk, but there was still quite a lot of time left -- what else could be done on the drawing? Fortunately Kate came by and suggested that I was all but finished. Here's the end product -