The Best and Worst of Figure Drawing (Week 3)

So, here we are at week three's coverage.  Before continuing though I suppose I should say a little about what this figure drawing lark is.  Once upon a time the company I work for had a figure drawing class every week.  I attended it to begin with (and I'll share some sketches from those sessions with you eventually, so you can see how much I back slid for yourselves), but eventually life got in the way a little and my attendance dropped off and then stopped.  Eventually the same happened for most of the attendants and so they stopped holding it.
It was then decided that a short course would be more likely to get people to attend regularly, so they started doing an 8 week set with one session a week.  This is the second they've done, and the first I've attended.  I guess they plan to do them every 6 months or so.

Our model doesn't pose naked (the ones in the old sessions did), rather, for the first 6 weeks she poses in a leotard and shorts, and then for the last two sessions she wears outfits designed to make for interesting drawing (The last 2 sessions focus on drawing cloth and clothing rather than the figure).  Got all that?  Good-oh, lets crack on.

 The Good:
 So, not really as good as the best from Week 2, but there's a few things I like in this lot.  The 1 minute figure (centre left) came out looking pretty nice - there's a good sense of balance to it and you can see the gesture line on which the figure is based running through it (part of it is that thing sticking out of her head making it look like she has Batman ears).  I also really like the figure on the right; it's the only time I used a water pen during the sessions in order to give the figure some depth (The water pen causes the ink to bleed, a little like a watercolour brush).  I didn't have time to finish her face on that one though; it sort of gives the effect that she's holding something semi-transparent in front of her face :)

The Bad:
Oh dear.  Once again there's really not much else to say about these.  You can see the gesture line on most of them, but it doesn't seem to have helped all that much.  The figure to the left (In tan) is probably the best of this bunch; I actually quite like it even though it's clearly dreadful.  Incidentally that was the first time I used my "eggshell" pen.  It's pretty good for laying down almost invisible construction lines - Unfortunately that also means it's incredibly difficult to scan and make visible; this sketch was artificially darkened by quite a bit, and it still looses most of the more subtle details.  I should make a point of not using it unless I really do want the lines to be invisible - Too late for the figure drawing classes sadly.