figure drawing class

It was our first day with a model in figure drawing class and we started with some contour drawings without looking at the paper. Practice of this sort of blind drawing, is not meant to produce a work of art, its purpose is for building an eye for observation.

After that we did a series of really fast gesture drawings, really fast meaning 15 seconds, the trick is to capture what the model is doing as quickly as you can.

Finely we went on to a couple ½ hour poses. I found my self struggling as usual and the instructor suggested that I abandon the outlining approach and block in the models gesture with sweeping applications of the vine charcoal and work the basic shapes in with your fingers, adding and subtracting  until the figures basic gesture and tonal values come together. I didn’t immediately  figure it out in class, but I went home and practiced it with better results. 

Im familiar with this type of drawing as its basically the Grisaille technique with charcoal instead of a burnt umber wash.