Today I got up early to join a British life drawing Zoom hosted by the 2B or Not 2B Collective, featuring model Bryant. Bryant is a dancer, and a bit of a contortionist, so today's poses were twisty and complex, with lots of interaction between hands and feet, lots of torso bending, etc. 

Here are the two 15-minute poses:

Not too complex yet, but some interesting foreshortening, especially in the forward arm.

This pose was a little more complex, and you can see that it looks like the leg tucked under his torso is maybe drawn too small. The thing is, it's not: He is just so flexible that most of that leg is way up behind him and out of sight. I like the way his hand came out in this one.

There were two ten-minute poses, one portrait, the other reclining:

Here's a little more typical interaction between his left arm and left leg, and that hand above the head gesture is a favorite of his, which he comes back to several times. It's interesting to me that the more elaborately intertwined he gets, the more it forces me to think about each limb, each section of the torso, as an individual shape.

In the portrait pose, I wanted to get his face as close to recognizable as I could, so I spent most of my time there. However, the lines in his abdomen were so interesting that I couldn't resist capturing them as well as I could. In the sketch, I think I captured his face pretty well, although looking now I can see that his lips are pretty messed up here - still, I think in a month when I look back at my sketchbook I will be able to recognize him from the eyes and nose and cheek shape, etc.

For me, five-minute poses and shorter are where I can tell whether I am learning, and WHAT I am learning. Here are the fives:

Here are the two minute poses:

In many ways, I think the 2-minute sketches came out better than the 5-minute ones, and I suspect it's because I feel more urgency in the shorter poses, so I focus more fully and get less hung up on minor details.

Finally, here are the one-minute sketches:

In a one-minute sketch, I don't even pretend that I can draw faces, haha. I really like the movement and energy of these, though - the pose on the far right, where he's holding one foot, balancing the other arm between the holding arm and the elevated let! I can't believe he didn't fall down.

Anyhow, thanks as always for coming to see my pictures!