There are some handy life drawing sites out there, one of which is https://artists.pixelovely.com/.  You can set it to give you gesture exercises (where you get 30-60 seconds per drawing) which is great for improving your focus and getting down the main shapes.  In the absence of having somebody naked to hand, I’m doing about half an hour every morning to keep my practice up.  Another blog I follow is https://www.johnmuirlaws.com/blog.  He’s a wildlife artist and there are some excellent tutorials on there.  One of his suggestions is to draw a box around the main body of the animal – it’s kind of an alternative to measuring out the scale.  I’ve been using it with life drawing and it not only helps but is so much more enjoyable than holding your pencil out, which takes me back to school art classes and not in a good way.  You can then follow that with the points system (where you map out the points on the body).  Here’s a pic from this morning using that method.

Rich watching the match last night.  His posture during Liverpool games alternates between this, tense and waiting to spring, to sprung and screaming at the TV; this applies to both good and bad results.  He felt it was important the score was added to the picture but I’m not sure it would be there if Man City had won.

I’ve been trying out a new method of getting people and heads down quickly, so there are a lot of figure drawing sketches lying around at the moment and not much else. Here are some androgynous folk..

I think I’ve found the perfect teaching combination in Andrew Loomis and Paul Richer, two great artists who wrote some classic texts on life drawing. Loomis was an illustrator of the 30s & 40s whose republished book Figure Drawing For All It’s Worth is full of advice for nailing the foundations of a person/picture. Richer was a 19th century doctor who put together Artistic Anatomy, a classic study of bones and muscles with the artist in mind.  Loomis’s advice can get quite specific to his time (women should be drawn with wide shoulders, narrow hips etc.) so I’ve adapted some of his techniques by cross-referencing with the more accurate Richer.

A couple of pages which pretty much represent what my sketchpad looks like at the moment..

I’m even more pleased with my combo having discovered they’re connected.  Richer was a professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris where George Bridgman studied; Bridgman went on to teach many illustrious students, including Loomis and Robert Beverly Hale, at the Art Students League of New York.  Hale (whose books I also use) became a renowned life drawing teacher himself and in the 60s translated Artistic Anatomy into English, ‘not only the most complete but the most accurate of contemporary works on artistic anatomy.’ I love the way this story demonstrates the legacy of a good teacher, influencing not only future artists but future teachers too.