Skyhook Games’ Life Drawing Society
During February and March we ran a series of life drawing classes which was open to all the Skyhook Games team. With digital art becoming more prominent by the day, we don’t want to fall out of touch with picking up a pencil (or charcoal) and utilising observational skills to complete a drawing.
Over the 4 week course, the group were taken through topics such as observation, quick sketching, as well as various exercises in loose drawing.
Week 1 – Observation
The first session began with a simple exercise. Look at the subject, draw entirely from memory, then comparing what you have drawn to the real thing. For those of us without a photographic memory, this was a real eye opener in how important it is too keep looking at the subject as you draw so you can capture the little details as best you can.
The second half of the session saw the group take on a drawing of our Art Director, Jon. You can take a look at a couple of the drawings below!
Week 2 – Observation Continued
Our second session began with a few warm ups centred around measuring techniques and drawing with the opposite hand (this went about as well as you would expect). The rest of this session proved to be rather challenging. We took what we had learned thus far and got to drawing the hands of the life model from our own perspective. While a few of us needed a bit longer to pick this up, as you can see, some where very adept at this!
Week 3 – Perspective
The third session saw the group spend a little more time on the weaker hand. We began by drawing side by side with one sketch completed with the preferred hand. Safe to say that some progress was being made here! The measuring techniques and observational skills were starting to come together.
The bulk of this class was spent on drawing with an eraser. Everyone took a piece of charcoal and blacked out one half of their paper so as to create the perfect canvas for sketching out a new kind of life drawing. This was a chance for the team to let the creative juices flourish in a new style. You’ll see from the results of this exercise that some great pieces of work came from this lesson!
Week 4 – Foreshortening
The finale, time to put the last 4 weeks of learning together! This was quite a challenge. Our model for this session was asked to put their foot on the table while we attempted to draw the full body and capture the position with a focus on foreshortening (creating an illusion of space). The warm ups began by drawing the lower leg and foot before spending the second half of the session combing it with the rest of the body, table and chair. Measurement techniques were key here so as to get a real sense of the dimensions we needed to mimic in order to achieve the desired affect.
As a bonus task, we were challenged with sketching some of the background – if we still had time left to spare.
Take a look below at a few of the drawings from the class.
We would like to say a big thank you to livlifedraw for taking us through the course and the insightful coaching!
If you didn’t already know, we’re running a massive giveaway to mark Lawn Mowing Simulator’s release on Nintendo Switch & Meta Quest platforms! To find out more about this, click here.
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