Life Drawing 2016

It's probably been a full year now since I last went life drawing - moving around for freelance jobs has stopped me from finding a regular place. This evening was incredible, though I felt very rusty! I also had Simon and Garfunkel stuck in my head the whole time because all I could think was 'Hello Charcoal My Old Friend'! Cheesy but true!

(Apologies for image quality - I don't have my scanner with me at the moment. Images will be re-uploaded at a later date. All images are A3 in real life.)

One 5-minute sketch, one 15-minute rendered drawing

20-minute drawing.

Final 30-minute drawing.

Ballerina Animation

Ballerina Sketch 01 from Julia Young on Vimeo.

A little animated doodle I did this weekend of a ballerina, done after seeing this image by Omar Z Robles, which I felt just had to be animated:

It's been a while since I last posted, but I'm hopeful that a regular posting schedule will resume shortly!

Life Drawing

Keeping up the life drawing as a nice, regular break from the constant animating!

Life Drawing

Life drawings from two of our most recent sessions. Each sketch was done in one of a range of short times; 30 seconds, 2 minutes and 5 minutes. The model in the first image is a professional ballerina and so we made the most of short, dynamic poses and had a great time! The second set of life sketches were done in pen, so even though more drawings were done for longer times, there was still a need for dynamic strokes.

The Week in Pictures

This time of year is enormously stressful at university as deadlines are getting closer! For the sake of my sanity however, I've been making sure to take some time out of university to get some fresh air, see the sunshine and do some drawing. I even went to London this week to see a screening of 'The Wind Rises' to review it for Skwigly (I'll keep you posted on when that's up).

I found a lovely little coffee shop this week where I spent some time
enjoying a creamy, marshmallowy, sinfully delicious hot chocolate and drew
people in the cafe, at the bus stop opposite and at the cash machine too. Each
of these drawings are roughly an inch tall, scribbled into my A6 sketchbook.

Later, I spent some time on a park bench in the sunshine experimenting with hatching techniques on the trees and seeing how few marks I could use to draw a dog. It sounds funny, I know, but it was a very enjoyable use of an hour, I have to say!

There was a piece of broken pottery in the park
that appeared very red against the green of the grass.

At life drawing, our model attempted to make us artists appreciate
the strain that a model is put through during a session. One of the
first years agreed to try a pose that involved putting all her weight onto one
foot while holding her arms out and agreed that it is really quite strenuous!

Life drawings after the break:

Life Drawing

I apologise for missing a post yesterday; I returned home late from life drawing and completely forgot! It's been a while since I last went life drawing and I hope you enjoy these drawings.

Unusually, there were three models present and so we played 'life model tag', the idea being that we each drew a stickman of a post that we wanted to see and the models took it in turns posing for us. We also had a new life model. She is super-skinny but lovely to draw - lots of angles and bones.

Life Drawing Withdrawal Cont.

Well, it turns out that there was no life drawing session this week. Monday is a big essay deadline day for me so realistically I should have been doing no drawing and just concentrating on writing... Well... I can't live like that!

Have some clothed models before the break with some more life drawing afterwards.

Life Drawing Withdrawal

I was flicking through my sketchbook over the weekend when I stumbled over some life drawing studies and was overcome with a wave of withdrawal. Somehow I don't feel like I've been drawing at all unless I've been life drawing.

As usual, I'll pop in a break and for those of you who don't wish to continue, please enjoy these drawings of fellow passengers on a train and appreciate how truly creepy I felt surreptitiously drawing them...

Life Drawing

I realised over the weekend that the end of term means the end of life drawing until January, so it seems like a good a time to update my blog with the drawings I've done since the last life drawing post. Once again, I'll put in a break just in case you've stumbled over my blog and either don't know what life drawing is or just don't want to see naked people!

For those of you who won't click to see more of this post, please accept some quick development sketches of my mouse character from my film idea as a 'mini' post.

Warning: (tasteful) nudity beyond this point.

Life Drawing

Life drawing is incredibly important for animators on many levels; it helps us practice anatomy, speed drawing and most of all getting the feel of weight and movement into our drawings. Over the last four weeks I have been attending a regular life drawing session and would like to share some of my favourite drawings here.

As you can see from my journal post before the first session,

I am very excited to be life drawing again! 

For those of you who do not know what life drawing is or have just stumbled over my blog, I have inserted a break here and a (tasteful) nudity warning.