Today we did life drawings, I find these exercises useful as they help me familiarize myself with the human body and learn to capture the movement and 3D nature of it, something that photographs often can’t truly display. I liked the wide variety of poses from all angles as it pushed me to draw areas of the body that I struggle with.
I think these exercises will greatly develop my animation skills because they’re fast-paced, generally between 2-3 minutes to 30 minutes for the extended drawings. Animations require a fast-paced work ethic, consistency and the ability to make decisions on the fly, these are all skills gained from life drawings. I found that as the class went on I was more comfortable using darker tones and not only capturing the pose but the atmosphere too. My concept of space and proportions became more consistent.
I also learnt a lot from my classmates, as I looked around the room I saw all the different techniques they used, ways of using the charcoal and how they filled up the page. Just from looking at this I was able to apply some of those techniques to my own work, this improved my work, notably the backgrounds and size of the subject on the page.
