Life drawing with Richard

This was the final drawing of the session, completed in around 35 minutes, using 3B pencil. I decided to go back to using pencil (rather than my usual Conte crayon on coloured paper) in order to focus on line and getting shape and proportion right.
The pose was quite tricky to pin down, because Richard had his right hip slightly raised so that both knees were slanted away from me. I'm not sure what he was doing with the left arm but it was out of view for me. After some considerable use fo the putty rubber, I think I've come up with a fair approximation of the figure, although I did struggle quite a lot with the hand and the feet.
Preparatory sketches
In the lead-up to the final study, we did a number of faster sketches in quite with some quite interesting poses, such as these....(lefthand took five minutes; righthand 10)
I'm quite pleased with the right foot of the lefthand figure, in which I appear to have captured the shape and the foreshortening, despite (or possibly because of) having to work at speed.

This 15 minute pose, although quite simple, did not come out quite so well...maybe because I couldn't see enough of the model from my angle...I re-worked the right arm several times, trying to get the shape of the elbow and fore-arm, and I'm still not sure it's quite right.

Life drawing - 2nd session with Marie

I first drew Marie during one of my early life-drawing sessions back in May, so I'm hoping that these drawings will demonstrate some improvement since then.

The session started with a couple of very quick (three minutes) sketches in different poses, folowed by one of five minutes. I used charcoal pencil on white cartridge paper for these...

Then followed a crouching pose of 15 minutes, for which I chose Conte crayon on coloured paper. This was a tricky pose with both the head and most of the arms hidden from me, and the stool she was leaning on was covered in a white sheet. I decided to focus on the line of the spine and buttocks to anchor the image and then build out from there.

Finally, we did a long pose of nearly an hour. I stuck with Conte crayon and tried using the white and grey crayons more extensively to pick out the lighter parts of the body. The left leg and knee gave me a bit of trouble for a while, as the knee was pointing out at me and the foot was tucked under tucked under the right leg.
While there is obviously more work to be done, especially on hands and feets, and getting a better facial likeness of the model, I think I can see and improvementover the pictures done in May....