The Many Benefits of Life Drawing

I really want to get into life drawing. I’ve always gravitated towards drawing from photographs, not from real life. I’ve heard so many great things about it, which I’m going to share in this short blog post.

I first became interested in it a few years ago, back when I was obsessed with watching Calarts sketchbook tours on YouTube. I have zero intention of pursuing art as a career for a few reasons, but I was really into these videos. I’ve probably seen every Calarts video on YouTube. The wide range of styles and the immense skill shown was what drew me to these sketchbook tours.

One thing that every single accepted sketchbook had in common was the huge amount of life drawing pages. These were something that really interested me, as I’d never tried it before.

Life drawing lets you study the human form and how it works: how the body moves and looks from different angles. You can understand how a certain pose looks and how the different parts of the body work in relation to each other. For example, when your subject sits with one leg crossed over the other, you can study how they position the rest of their body to stay balanced.

As well, you can study light and shadow interacting with your subject. Most professional classes will use harsh lighting on their model to cast some interesting shadows. These help to show form and movement in your drawing.

Not only does it improve your abilities at drawing people, it helps with another crucial art skill: translating an image from 3D into 2D. This is much more difficult than drawing something that is already 2D. There’s more foreshortening and more shading involved to make it look realistic, as well as deciding how to frame your piece. When you draw from 3D, you’re seeing a whole wide range of things in your field of vision. You have to decide what you’re going to include and what you’re going to leave out.

Life drawing doesn’t actually have to be a person. The term encompasses drawing anything from real life and not a photograph. You can also draw objects or landscapes if that fits your style better! Some people classify drawings of objects as observational drawings and not technically life drawings, but I like to use the same term for both.

Here are a few examples of my life drawings! There's honestly not many, but I've chosen some good ones that I did recently.

This one is a drawing of my desk. I had just been painting with watercolours and had my supplies sitting out. Using a ballpoint pen, I sketched the layout and then coloured it in with some water-based markers I mixed with water to give a paint effect.

Here I drew my supplies again, this time focusing on the harsh lighting provided by my desk lamp.

This is one of my friends on her phone at lunch. I really like this drawing; I think I captured her likeness. The only problem is the hand (I really need to work on drawing hands)!!

This is my sister doing homework on her laptop.

It's clear that life drawing is an extremely important practice and a great way to refine your art skills. That's why I want to shift my focus more onto it in the coming months.

Have you ever tried life drawing? Let me know in the comments.

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