The Best and Worst of Figure Drawing (Week 1)

So it took a while to scan images in from the Figure Drawing sessions I've been attending at work (I still have one left to scan).  It was an 8 week thing and finished last Friday, of those I missed one.  This post shows the first week.

I had considered only showing the best of the work that came out of the sessions, but since this blog is about my improving that seemed a little counter productive.  You'd see my work get better, but only my best work - better if you see the worse work improving too I think.  So, you get the best and the worst...

Well, almost the worst, there are some images so bad I can't even bring myself to scan them in, but just see the worse I am showing and then assume that the rest are even more dreadful.  Thankfully those freakishly vile ones are in the minority.

There are also a bunch of images somewhere in between the best and the worst. I scanned them, but won't be showing them here as who wants to see hundreds of middle of the road drawings, eh?

On with the show then:

That's the best work from Week 1 (Click the image to find a larger version - likewise for most images on the blog).  Better than I expected, or remembered as it goes.  The scratchy one on the left was an early one, while I was just warming up, and I think the one on the upper right does a good job of getting across the twist in the pose.  My favourite of the set is the centre top one though, and I really don't know why, it just looks the most interesting to me.  OK, you might now be wondering why I have a blog about getting better at drawing again if I can produce reasonably human looking figures.  Well...

Yeah.  Not so great.  So actually even these are better than I had originally remembered - in fact I think my work suffered a remarkable decline between the first and second weeks (next post), but even so, these are horrific.  How many lower legs does the figure in the lower left have?  Is the one in the middle giving you double barreled fingers? Is the figure on the far right facing you, or looking away?  I don't know, I can't remember (fairly sure she was never giving me the finger though)!

Ugh.