Lifedrawing: Hands & Feet

We began another new project today. This time, it's about life drawing. (Basically, observation sketches of the human form.)

Today, we focused on producing life drawings of hands and feet of the model. I found this quite challenging because I'm not used to drawing people, although I do observation drawings of objects at home quite a lot. I was very nervous, but they did come out better than anticipated!:

 These three sketches were done in pencil. I was a bit nervous about doing them because I've never done lifedrawing before, but I think they turned out well. For each sketch we had a 15 minute time limit which I found fairly hard to do but even so I think these sketches turned out well because I got nearly all proportions right as well as some shading, particularly on the hand. With these sketches, I drew without mapping out the basic shapes first, which took quite a lot of time, and I had to rub out various things. I'm happy with these results.

With some pages, I tea-stained the paper around my sketches to make my book look more exciting. I decided on tea staining because it's a different technique to usual paint washes and it gives an authentic look to the book.

These  next two sketches were done in charcoal.  The first sketch is quite rough and low in accuracy because it was the first time I used charcoal for sketching and I made a few mistakes which I couldn't rub out. Again, with this sketch I went straight into the detail without first mapping out the shapes. It is unfinished. 

           

My second attempt at using charcoal is much better. It is neater and I've been more fluent in achieving density with the charcoal on the shading. I mapped out the basic shape of the fist before filling in the detail of the fingers. I think this is my best drawing because it has good shading and it is almost to scale unlike my initial sketches. I think it helped sketching the basic parts first.

These are my final sketches. The one of the hand is again done in charcoal, and is also good but the palm needs to be bigger.

These final two sketches were done using graphite stick, which I prefer to charcoal because it still allows a great variety of densities, but it doesn't smudge like charcoal and it is easier to control.

   I like this first sketch I did of the hand holding the foot, because I got a good sense of shade and shape, especially on the toes. One thing I need to improve is not having the outside lines too heavy, because it takes away the realism.

Here is my final sketch. It was done in graphite stick again and was done on brown paper to add some texture. I found this one quite tricky because I couldn't seem to get the perspective of the heel right; however I think the toes are accurately drawn.

Well, that about sums it up for the hands & feet drawings. I really enjoyed doing it because I've never done it before. I didn't like the time limits but it is useful to do because gets you used to the tight limits just as it would in the real world. 

I'm happy with these initial sketches, and to improve I will learn to map out shapes first.