Life Studies I

I am always trying to improve my work, both for my professional and personal improvement. Believe it or not I have not done a lot of life study art in the past. A few times in college, and that is about it. While perusing the interwebs I found several suppliers of life art videos on youtube.com. 

The one I found the most helpful was one called Croquis Cafe. They give you timed images of models that you can readily choose from and place them in a variety of interesting positions so that artists can study them. 

They start off with one minute drills, leading to 2 minuted drills and then a five minute drill. None of that really works for me, so I pause the video so that I can concentrate more on figure. 

Anyway I thought I would share a handful of them here. 

This is what came out when I tried to do a one minute study. 

Not very good here. I think I tried too hard to focus on building those shapes before and not concentrating on the outline of the figure. 

Next is a bit longer, I think this one took about 2 min. 

This one is significantly better, and using the whole 2 minutes was hard to define details, but getting the general feel for the position was key. 

I found throughout the study time I allocated that I needed more time for each model than what the video gave me. I took about 3-5 minutes for each of the following. I think overall my speed improved, and I suppose if I continued to do these life studies, my time would improve dramatically.

Here are a few more. 

Each of those felt really good to me, and I could see some improvement from the first few. 

Here my techniques have improved drastically I think. The overall form and figure are smoothing out, and the line work is much more strong. 

I see marked improvement in building the figures here. The contours are well defined with few lines, shading and structure are better as well. These took about 4 min each to complete. 

This one was the epitome of my life study experience during this session. I feel like I was able to give the proportion, concept, shading and characterization of the figure its deserved attention. I think I spent like 10 minutes on this one. 

Throughout all of these I erased very little, and just let the pencil glide across the paper. These are simple to do, and take very little time. I suggest anyone who is interested in drawing realistically to do some life studies, even if you do not time yourself. And with the resources listed above, you do not even have to leave the comfort of your own home, travel to a college or be placed in a room with fifteen to twenty other "artists" and a model. 

One of these days i would like to do a true life study with a real model, but time and money are a huge factor. 

Thanks for looking comments always welcome.