Hi there welcome to my studio my name is siobhan this is art skills online this is
my youtube channel where i post videos related to figure drawing and specifically how to develop a
natural responsive style of drawing through drawing the figure i focus on gesture and
contour so if bigger drawing is something that you're interested in or if you want to learn
how to draw then stay tuned and consider subscribing so that we can stay in touch
i usually post videos of either my process my drawing process or tips and techniques that
i think might be useful and today's video is a process video of a large scale drawing that i did
of the model i made this drawing based on photo reference and i'll leave a link to the exact
pose in the description below it's from new masters academy so check it out if you want
to follow along with me so here's the video i will explain a little bit about the process
and about some of the issues that i ran into and how i tried to resolve
them i hope you enjoy it and i'll check back in with you at the end
so as you can see it's quite a setup to work large i used a roll of fabriano 120 grams and to draw
this big you really do need a large size board to draw on because drawing flash on a surface like a
table or the floor will cause a lot of issues for proportion so you really do need to be standing up
and i posted a video about what paper i normally use for charcoal drawing last week but i didn't
mention fabriano and somebody actually reminded me about that in the comments so thanks very much for
that comment that actually in part inspired me to take this paper out but i also wanted to get
away from drawing in a sketchbook and just kind of loosen up and try and draw in a big large format
so as usual i always spend the first while of the drawing or at least the first good portion of it
just trying to get the impression of the pose down on paper as loosely and as roughly as i can
i'm aiming to really make that tilt of the rib cage and the pelvis read very clearly in the
drawing so this took me quite a while i worked on that for a long time because getting that
torso the angle of the torso correct really kind of anchors the whole rest of the drawing
this pose seems simple at first but there's actually a bit of a twist going on in the torso
so it's not really a straightforward contrapposto facing forwards i feel like the pelvis is actually
turning away from us and the shoulders are turning towards us
i'm also using willow or vine charcoal which i tend to rarely draw with
but on this paper particularly it's really nice to work with it's very light and you can get very
detailed finesse lines with it but crucially you can also erase it which i needed to do a
lot in this drawing in order to get the scale and the proportion correct so for that i am using a
kneaded eraser and doing quite a bit of erasing out as the drawing progresses just to get that
proportion right make corrections but i still want to very much consciously draw in a gestural way
this size of a drawing this is large scale and by that i really mean larger than a sketchbook
but it's obviously smaller than life size the main point that i want to make about this format
is that personally i'm much more used to drawing like this size in a live figure drawing class
working from life so working from a photo reference to the scale is really challenging
and it's not ideal to be honest i find photo reference fine for small drawings in my sketchbook
but this scale in this context the flat sort of 2d quality of the photo really highlights the
limitations of drawing from that and i i think that does show in the final drawing having said
that it was just so nice to break out of the small sketchbook and just do something bigger
when you're drawing in your sketchbook you really are only moving just your hand and forearm whereas
drawing like this you have to stand up use your whole body and i've mentioned before
that i think gesture drawings are as much about the gesture that you make across the page
as they are about the gesture of the
model
so i'm getting close to the end of the drawing here and i just made a few marks
for the features of the face because i was a bit nervous about going in i'm definitely not trying
to draw a portrait at all so i really just wanted to give some loose indications as to the features
and then the last thing i worked on was the legs the legs were very challenging to draw the size
probably they are slightly out of proportion i erased here quite a bit to try and get it right
but i worked to get the shadows shaped around the knee and then the upper leg
working and then i just found the ankle for the lower leg and foot and once that's in place
at least you know the drawing is grounded and she's not sort of floating in the page
all in all i think it turned out to be a drawing that probably could use
a lot of correcting and finessing but the aim as i said was to work gesturally throughout and to get
a dynamic expressive quality rather than a super detailed photo quality drawing
thank you so much for watching this video all the way to the end i really appreciate
it i hope you enjoyed it and i hope you got some useful information out of it or at least
got some inspiration for your own drawing especially if you haven't tried drawing
large format before and you want to give it a go let me know in the comments what
you think if you've got any questions or just say hi i'd love to hear from you and consider
subscribing if you haven't already thanks again for watching and i'll see you in the next video