Life Drawing

I’ve loved Life Drawing since my first class when I was 16. It’s a fascinating challenge to try capture the figure and mood in such a short amount of time. And it’s a wonderful way to regularly practice your drawing skills in a great environment with like-minded people. It helps develop hand-eye coordination, fine-tune your observational skills, and can be quite meditative. And each session is so unique. Our bodies are so diverse and each model brings their own energy and style of poses, which really influences the session and results in such varied drawings.

With short poses, it can be very difficult to capture the full pose, so I often chose to focus on a particularly interesting part of the figure or pose. I find these partial or incomplete drawings to be most intriguing — they engage your imagination, compelling you to interact with the drawing and complete it with your mind’s eye.

Here are a selection of Life Drawings over the last few years. The length of time for the poses range from quick, gestural poses (1 and 2 minutes), short poses (5 or 10 minutes), and longer poses (20 or 30 minutes). I like to work on sheets of 18 x 24” (newsprint, white, cream or brown paper) and use a mix of conté sticks, compressed charcoal, and chalks.

These life drawings often become studies, inspiring new works and explorations in other media. If you’re curious to see them, please take a look at my ‘Figures’ Gallery.

And some of these are still available for sale, or can be made into prints. If you are interested in any of them, please contact me.