33: Figure drawings

Work done for my Life Drawing class. It's nowhere near finished, though I doubt I'll be able to work on it again. I'm one of those people that really need a reference. I can't just draw off the top of my head. Unless I can get someone to model the same pose and have the same body type/size/shape...yeah, I'm most likely not working on it anymore.

Before the drawing above, I'd spent about 3 hours frustrated. Before this class, we had done sketches from a hanging skeleton. I'd memorized how the skeleton looked and was imagining how the model's skeleton looked underneath her skin and flesh. I would first sketch out how I visualized her skeleton looked, then drew the flesh around it.

All of these came out wrong. The torso was alright, but the pelvis/hips/butt region looked....off somehow.

I spent a long time staring at these and doing more and more sketches trying to figure it out. Then I realized where I was going wrong. I had been drawing from a skeleton, though a real one, that was hung in a way that the human body is not.

I was imagining the model's skeleton the way it would have hung. I was drawing the hips as if the head of the leg bone was hanging an inch below the socket....the way the skeleton's leg hung from a wire.

It took another half hour of sketching till I got it right. After that, we got a 45 minute block to draw one pose. the result is the first picture of this post.

What do you guys think?