Part 4 Project 3 Exercise 1 Basic Shapes

Despite scanning the internet for suitable poses on some of the Life Drawing websites, I decided that I would rather just get my husband to take varying shots of me for the purpose of this exercise. Drawing yourself is always a challenge as you already have preconceived ideas about your body's proportions, but I tried to discredit this prior knowledge and just look. I positioned myself on our coffee table with a slight shift in my torso and the angle of my gaze was upwards. I knew that this would create some challenging drawing, which it did!

Once again I ran into the same problem with the sizing of the head. I think that this is because each of the poses I had were taken from slightly down below and there was foreshortening happening in each position.

I chose to just stick to using a 4B pencil as my media, as I wanted to concentrate of the proportions and shapes, and not so much on technique. In the first sketch the main areas where there were foreshortening were in the outwardly turned elbow, the sole of the foot jutting towards the viewer at an angle, and flattened leg. I found getting the proportions of the buttocks quite hard, causing me to keep shifting the baseline further down. I like the movement of this pose as there is a flow from the top of the head down the sweep of the back and then your eye does almost an '&' sign across the folded legs and back up the resting arm. Very little of the face can be seen, meaning that there is a greater emphasis on getting the shadows right.

Initial Sketch

In this second sketch, I encountered a lot more curves and counter-curves. This actually proved harder to draw as there was less opportunity to line up the shapes with the parallels of the sides of the page. I am really dissatisfied with the face, as it does not look curved enough. I worked on it quite a bit and eventually decided that this exercise was not about getting the portrait to look great - so, I quit adjusting it. What was also hard about this sketch is that the lighting was from front on, meaning that the figure appears flatter than in the other views. The foreshortening that was the most marked in this sketch was the forearm wrapping around the raised knee. This reduced the forearm to an elliptical shape.

Second Sketch

For my final sketch in this series, I chose another shot with side-lighting. From this angle the twist in the torso and arms is really evident. Once again, this adds to the twisting movement around the form, adding some interest to the pose. The head is tilted in the opposite direction to the movement of the shoulders. I am happy with the foreshortening in the foot tucked under the crossed leg. The knee is a little less convincing  as I think it might have some shadows in the wrong place. 

This sketch gave me a lot of troubles with the proportion of the head. I found that I drew the head too big for the foreshortened angle. I redrew the head with its facial features a number of times, until I shrank it to the correct size. On checking the proportions, using the head as the reference point, I finally think I have it correctly sized.

Final Sketch