I took a life-drawing workshop last evening, and the moderator really favored short poses, so we did five 2-minute poses, six 5-minute poses, a couple 10s and a couple 15s. During the 2-minute poses, I noticed how much further along I was getting these days in that short time, and I thought it might be interesting to look back at what I was drawing last fall, when I started taking these workshops, to compare sketches based on time spent, you know? 

The difference is striking.

Here, check out the difference between 15-minute sketches. I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide which are from last night and which are from last November.

I think the difference is already pretty visible, but it gets more noticeable the shorter the poses get, so here's the 10-minute sketch comparison:

See what I mean? But CHECK THIS OUT. Here are the two-minute sketches. I was like "what?!"

See what I mean? When I started this process out, I barely had time (in two minutes) to lay out the basic shapes of oval head, triangle torso, rectangle pelvis, etc, and they were not generally proportionally right. Now I have time to capture gesture a little, and even get some details like hair style, etc.

The first pose I decided not to fart around with the body at all, and I focused on the head/face exclusively for that one, and I still ran out of time, but I am pretty happy with the placement and formation of the facial features I did get in there, and with the shape of the hair, etc. Obviously still plenty of room for work on faces haha. 

But that's pretty instructive, to be honest. You can see in most of the newer 2-minute drawings that I haven't worried so much about drawing all of the parts; instead I spent my effort/time drawing better by focusing on relationships between parts (hand on knees, elbow on knee, chin over shoulder, hand by ear, etc) - that seems to have helped me get a much better sense of body proportions.

Anyhow, I know that all of these figure drawing posts have sort of started to blur together, but it's nice to know that the work has been paying off, and in very visible ways.

thanks for looking at my pictures :D