One Short Practice Pose

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If you’ve ever eaten a really good peach, chances are you’ve tasted a bad one too. It’s disappointing, but that’s the risk you take when you eat fruit. Unfortunately for us amateur sketch artists, the same rule applies to those who draw live models.

Throughout your life drawing career, sometimes you’ll run into some really professional, steady models, but sometimes you won’t be so lucky. Chatty, wiggly people willing to pose nude in front of a room full of strangers are a dime a dozen, so prepare yourself for the inevitable.

When I attend workshops, I bring lots of pencils, an eraser and enough music to last me through the night. No matter your model’s style (whether quiet and still or conversational and unsteady), I strongly recommend listening to Nick Drake while you draw. His music is quiet enough to keep you calm, but busy enough to drown out the sound of chatter.

With that said, now that you know everything I know about life drawing, it’s time to put theory into practice.

Below, I’ve prepared a warm-up sketching exercise for you to draw along with to get an idea of what it’ll be like when you attend your first workshop. The pose in the video lasts two minutes, but you’re welcome to pause it and set a timer for a longer sitting (20 minutes).

While I intentionally wore socks to spare you from having to draw my feet, I left my hands visible so that you could give them a go using the skills you’ve learned in my previous posts. If you still end up drawing cow teats, however, don’t fret. Even some of the pros avoid drawing hands.

For those who would like to practice drawing other artists into your sketches, try drawing my shadows as if they were real people. And remember not to look at the other people in the room for too long or you’ll blow your cover.

Once you’ve attended a few workshops, I’m hopeful that you’ll find your own older man across the room, and that you'll enjoy life drawing as much as I do. 

This is why you should try to avoid using scrap paper when you run out of space in your sketchbook. 

CINDY OLBERG

Cindy is an aspiring writer who has recently decided to adopt a new hobby. Equipped with her sense of humour and limited artistic ability, she will take you on a tour of some of Ottawa’s life drawing workshops, and hopes to inspire you along the way. 

Follow Cindy on Twitter and Instagram
Find a life drawing workshop near you

Mad Men in the Dark

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In a study of 40 young men, those given alcohol had an easier time thinking creatively than those who stayed sober. Naturally, for the sake of my blog, I thought it would be an interesting experiment for me to test those findings for myself. The Mad Men edition of "Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School" at the Mercury Lounge, however, was anything but a controlled environment. The bar was dimly lit, the rumour about five dollar tacos was bogus, and Emily (my classmate/guinea pig) and I had to sit upstairs because there was limited seating available around the models’ platform. Nevertheless, despite our many obstacles, we ended up having a really good time.

In the beginning, the going was tough. The models were clothed in inconsiderately difficult clothing for my drawing level (suit and dress), the other artists present wouldn’t stay still for long enough for me to draw them and… there were no tacos.

But then, halfway through my second beer, I found the gumption to take out my new pastels, and I’m glad I did. I, a floundering novice trying to draw flowing material in the dark, had done the impossible and found the easy way! Not only were the lines from the pastels more visible in the cellphone glow, but I could also get away with so much less attention to detail. I no longer had to put so much effort into making sure my dresses didn’t look like potato sacks, and it felt liberating.

TIP: If you’re around my level and attempting to draw clothing for the first time, watch this tutorial and use charcoal instead of pastels. While I was content with my drawings from the Mad Men event, I have since run into nothing but trouble with those goopy villain-sticks!

 My experiment rendered positive results, but I still wouldn’t send a first-time life drawer to a Dr. Sketchy event. Call me old-fashioned, but I think a beginner should be granted with good lighting, sobriety and naked models. 

My first few sketches of the night

Emily's drawings

my last drawing of the night

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Cindy Olberg

Cindy is an aspiring writer who has recently decided to adopt a new hobby. Equipped with her sense of humour and limited artistic ability, she will take you on a tour of some of Ottawa’s life drawing workshops, and hopes to inspire you along the way. 

Follow Cindy on Twitter and Instagram
Find a life drawing workshop near you

Drawing a Superhero

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Words cannot begin to describe how excited I was for the Super Life Drawing session at The Comic Book Shoppe on Bank Street. As I walked down the stairs to the basement of the store, the Star Wars theme song was playing, there was promise of costumes and I was about to spend my afternoon drawing superheroes. Amazing.

Little did I know, however, I was also about to gain a whole new level of respect for graphic artists and Renaissance painters alike.

As a novice artist, I find I draw better when I don’t have to worry about clothing and props. When my model is nude, if I don’t want to use “foreshortening” (the technique I mentioned in my last post), I don’t have to. My hands may look like cow teats sometimes, but I'm usually able to embrace my little blunders and leave a workshop feeling content with my sketches overall. When you add clothing into the mix, however, things get tricky.

Our model at the Super Life Drawing session, the beautiful Cherry Valance, was dressed in an outfit that consisted of a long-sleeved stretchy bodysuit, hard-shell armor and a gun (which eventually switched to a light saber, but still didn’t end up helping my cause). And, as you can tell from my drawings, I had a hard time.

The artists’ challenge was to draw our model “using the force in a creative way,” but I was just trying to draw her without making her look like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle holding a mini battleship. I failed.

I eventually found this simple tutorial, should you ever need to know how to draw a gun, that suggests first drawing lines and rectangles as guides instead of free-handing your sketch. 

Next time, I'll be keeping with the costumed model theme as I discuss the night I attended a Mad Men-themed life drawing session with beer and very low lighting.  

 

 

My first time drawing a hand holding a gun. nailed it. 

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Cindy Olberg

Cindy is an aspiring writer who has recently decided to adopt a new hobby. Equipped with her token sense of humour and limited artistic ability, she will take you on a tour of some of Ottawa’s life drawing workshops and hopefully inspire you along the way. 

Follow Cindy on Twitter and Instagram
Find a life drawing workshop near you

 

Interactions Between Artists

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I used to fantasize about what my life would be like if I married a Russian painter. We would lounge in our studio apartment, sharing cigarettes, caviar and snooty repartee with his smooth-legged muses. Unfortunately for my hypothetical Russian husband, I've moved on from that lofty dream, but I do still enjoy discussing art with those who spend their days creating it.

Every Wednesday, I go to the Sandy Hill Life Drawing Workshop with my friends Clare and Lisa (who post their pieces on their Instagram and art blog, respectively). We all live nearby, so on our walk home we chitchat about the poses we liked, the poses we didn’t and the reasons why we hate drawing hands. 

Recently, the girls tried to teach me about “foreshortening,” a technique used to draw objects that look shorter than they are because of the way they’re positioned. This skill is especially useful for artists who plan to draw their models with hands. On the other hand, I tend to just hope I can’t see them from wherever I’m sitting.

I do, however, always plan to sit across from the older man I mentioned in my last post. Over the last five workshops, I’ve drawn him at least once in order to track the progress of my new hobby. But, I may have blown my cover. 

Last week, I got a bit cocky with where I chose to sit and I think he caught on to what I was doing. Until then, we’d never so much as made eye contact. That night, I had a sneaking suspicion he was going to try to talk to me. From what I could tell, he seemed playfully flattered by whatever he thought I was doing. So, I saw no harm in looking busy when he came to my side of the room. 

Unless I grow tired of drawing him, I don't think I'll ever introduce myself to the older man across the room. After all, his mystique was what piqued my interest in the first place.

According to my sketchbook, without foreshortening, drawn hands tend look more like cow teats. 

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Cindy Olberg

Cindy is an aspiring writer who has recently decided to adopt a new hobby. Equipped with her sense of humour and limited artistic ability, she will take you on a tour of some of Ottawa’s life drawing workshops, and hopes to inspire you along the way. 

Follow Cindy on Twitter and Instagram
Find a life drawing workshop near you

My First Life Drawing Workshop

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As I locked up my bike outside the Sandy Hill Community Centre, I realized I was about to stare at a naked stranger for two hours. While I would normally refer to myself as a mature adult, on that particular Wednesday night, I was just hoping I'd be able to get through my first life drawing workshop without giggling. That's why I was so relieved, when Isabelle stepped onto the podium in the buff, that I managed to keep my composure.

My first twenty minute sketch

While most of the other artists went right for the "thumb and pencil technique," I took a few seconds to observe our model. Now that I was planning on drawing her, Isabelle was so much more than "the attractive naked female in the middle of the room." To my newly-honed artist's eye, her body had become a series of lines and shapes connected in ways I'd never noticed on anyone before. 

The first few poses of life drawing workshops usually last around two minutes, so you're not supposed to focus on detail. However, by the time we got to the halfway point of our first twenty-minute pose, my drawing was sort of... finished. As a beginning sketch artist, there's only so much shading you can do before your model starts to look dirty. So, I started to peek around the room for another muse.

In the art world, it's apparently common knowledge that you're allowed to use anything and anyone around the room as props and characters in your sketch, as long as you're respectful and discreet. I just wish that someone had told me before I'd spent 13 minutes stealing creepy glances at the older man across the room. As my blog progresses, from time to time, you'll be seeing more of the man featured in my first twenty-minute sketch. I don't know who he is or what he does outside of the Sandy Hill Life Drawing Workshop, but I think his face is fascinating and, more importantly, fun to draw. 

 

Cindy Olberg

Cindy is an aspiring writer who has recently decided to adopt a new hobby. Equipped with her sense of humour and limited artistic ability, she will take you on a tour of some of Ottawa’s life drawing workshops, and hopes to inspire you along the way.

Follow Cindy on Twitter and Instagram
Find a life drawing workshop near you