After about a decade break for attending life drawing sessions in Los Angeles, I was enticed back to life drawing again in Tavira. I struggled with my sketching style the first couple of sessions, but over the next few classes I realised how useful life drawing is for urban sketchers.

Both disciplines are all about:

Looking for the line of action,

Capturing the essence of the pose, and

Drawing what you see.

Sketching Style for Life Drawing

In the first session I opted for charcoal pencil to draw in the traditional “life drawing style” of capturing realistic representations of the human form with minimal gesture lines. I don’t know why I abandoned my usual urban sketching style and reverted back to charcoal pencil for these life drawing sessions. Perceived expectations perhaps? Fitting in with the norm? (Didn’t like these sketches much, and ended up chucking them out before I photographed them for posterity.)

By week two, I gave up on the charcoal in favour of my beloved ink pens and captured poses with energetic scribbles. While other artists were labouring over simple contour lines and groaning when the timer went off. I’d already finished a scribble sketch or two, and was eager for a different pose.

When you’re urban sketching people you have no idea how long they’re going to stay put, so you have to sketch quickly. But with life drawing you know exactly how long you have for each pose. But it didn’t feel natural to slow down my usual sketching style during our life drawing sessions, so I stuck with my comfort zone of quick-on-the-draw.

Rather than using my usual urban sketching contour lines, I experimented with scribbles to create a sense of energy.

I like the juxtaposition of statue-still poses captured with energetic lines.

Using Line of Action – in Urban Sketching

When I’m urban sketching I may do a visual scan along the line of action, or draw an imaginary line in the air with my pen, but I don’t often add the line of action on my paper. I haven’t wanted those surplus lines of action or scribbled restated lines in my finished urban sketches.

Using Line of Action – in Life Drawing

But during my recent life drawing session, I discovered I liked seeing the lines of action and restated lines, and feel they add energy rather than detract from the believability of the sketch. I’ve been more active about drawing lines of action and also identifying the position of the joints, and the tilt of shoulders and hips. I also add guide lines for the features, but don’t add the actual features.

For me, these life drawing sessions are about getting more confident about capturing poses. I get to experiment and draw too many lines, all the while really learning how to draw what I see. It’s this skill of seeing that is going to keep me coming back to life drawing.

How Urban Sketchers can kill time during a long Life Drawing Pose

I tend to get a little bored with long life drawing poses (e.g. 20-30 minutes). I capture the pose quickly, and even if I have a few different attempts at the same pose, there’s only so many times I can sketch it. So I’ve come up with a couple of different solutions for killing time.

Killing Time by Urban Sketching

I started sketching the other people in the class. Happily reverting to urban sketching mode again to capture the moment and scene.

In this example above I tried incorporating urban sketching and messy lines. In this case, I think the surplus lines are a bit too distracting.

Killing Time by Adding Watercolour

I just attended my third life drawing session and this time I took my watercolours with me. So that once I’d sketched the posture in ink, I had plenty of time to try experimental watercolour.

It’s fun to experiment with really messy lines at life drawing, but the jury is still out on whether I adopt this sketching style while I’m urban sketching.