Last week I went to a life drawing session. The model was a large round very naked gentleman, and I must say, it took me a little while to adjust to drawing someone so very naked. But I think I did learn some things from it. You just have to keep drawing and drawing and hope that eventually you've made all the mistakes.
Its quite hard to draw all of a person. So easy for feet and things to end up off the edge of the paper. The guy in charge of the life drawing thing reckoned I should be painting on very large canvases, but this is both expensive and hard to store, so I think really I would prefer to learn how to get everything more successfully into the page.
I also trialled some varifocal contact lenses, since I noticed recently that sometimes it's hard to read the very small print on the back of a tube of paint in poor light. The varifocals were awful. I would rather have to turn on the light to read a tube of paint than put up with a vast deterioration in my distance vision! But it made me realise how fortunate I am that my eyesight with contact lenses is really pretty good, and apparently when my eyesight does get worse, there are several other kinds of varifocals I can try. It doesn't seem worth trying more of them yet though, since I learned that with my usual lenses in decent light I can happily read the bottom line of text on the test card thingy.
Its quite hard to draw all of a person. So easy for feet and things to end up off the edge of the paper. The guy in charge of the life drawing thing reckoned I should be painting on very large canvases, but this is both expensive and hard to store, so I think really I would prefer to learn how to get everything more successfully into the page.
I also trialled some varifocal contact lenses, since I noticed recently that sometimes it's hard to read the very small print on the back of a tube of paint in poor light. The varifocals were awful. I would rather have to turn on the light to read a tube of paint than put up with a vast deterioration in my distance vision! But it made me realise how fortunate I am that my eyesight with contact lenses is really pretty good, and apparently when my eyesight does get worse, there are several other kinds of varifocals I can try. It doesn't seem worth trying more of them yet though, since I learned that with my usual lenses in decent light I can happily read the bottom line of text on the test card thingy.
Comments
I died reading this! I would probably have taken a minute (or several) to adjust also. Good experience though.
I need varifocals too, these days, but I don't get on with any of the options I've tried so far.
I suppose I have been drawing a lot of people. I was a little surprised you said that my art was mainly about them, as I think of myself as much better at animals and landscapes, I've always struggled with faces and people, but I suppose I've been working on trying to improve those... and if you want to draw fanart or art of RPG events, it has to be people-y! Well, unless you turn them all into dogs or something.
I'm glad you can still use your contact lenses. I do okay with varifocals, only I tend to take them off to read, which means many an exasperated scavenger hunt through the house. Once they were in the dishpan under a bowl -- no idea how that happened. Another time they were on the sofa under a cat.