Take Your Skills Up a Notch with Life Drawing
If you can master life drawing, you’ll pretty much be able to draw anything
Every skilled artist will tell you about the importance of life drawing and how it can help you get better at illustrating what you see. Whether your goal as an artist is to render realistic or expressive figures, the process is the same. Drawing from life will force you to consider all the fundamentals. Shape, proportion, light, perspective, form — all of it comes together in your drawing.
However, life drawing can often be overwhelming if you’re someone who’s insecure about their skillset. Thankfully there are plenty of guided life drawing sittings that provide a very good introduction to the fundamentals of drawing any subject. One such sitting is held at Mosman Community College. Their program takes place once a week for 4 weeks (2 hours for every session), and there will be a live model featured each week.
Some words of advice for those trying out life drawing for the first time: Mistakes will be made but learn to accept them. Life drawing can be intimidating but it will teach you about spontaneity, how to be unfussy and leave out everything that is inessential. It can feel difficult to restrain yourself at first, but you will be surprised at the results when you choose to be carefree and refrain from judging your work too early in the process.