Yogi's Movie Consumption Blog

So, here is another new one. I tried to focus on clearer forms and better head positioning. Then I got lost and spent some time on the face of the guy to the left. Obviously, it came out totally wrong :) The head forms are a little closer to the guys there, but it lacks pretty much everything else. I focussed a little on the guy to the left. The results are not even close, head forms and position are really wrong. I'll focus on this guy for one or two pictures.

This one took about 20 minutes to finish. Better facial features here, but shows incorrect axes. The head second from left is smaller and farther away. Head and body positions need definitively some more thought. The positions of the heads are ok, but the sizes are mostly too big. The next couple of sketches should be only basic head forms to get them right.

This is the new version on the next day. It took 15 minutes (and I was talking on the phone). The positions of the heads are ok. The shapes are not too good yet. First time I also noticed the things around their necks, that add considerable volume. The chair I couldn't really remember, this one is way to high and has a pointy shape, which I definitively made up. The feet of the body are in good position. The position of the scissors is in the line of the hand. There is a lot of subtle head positionings I didn't seem to be able to depict fully. There are lines between the face of the teacher and his left hand the bodys left hand. same goes for the right hand.

So, a day later I sat down again and looked quickly at the original, then started off drawing again. The result lacks the detail of number four, as I stopped the time at exactly ten minutes. The arrangement of the heads is way better now, although some of the head turns are not satisfying yet - the general axi of the faces seem to point into the same direction (of the projection) except of the teachers. There is some sense of hands but I missed the hand of the man holding the paper and the hands of the man in the back and in the front. The body on the table is too short. I just realize that the teacher is actually sitting in a chair! The dark mass behind him seems to be the chair. Just to add: this is the arrangement of the 8 people (not considering the body) as I think of it now

A couple of hours later, I came up with this. I moved everything a little up in the picture, there is quite a big empty space at the bottom of the original. OK, the head positions seem more or less correct. (the 3 above the body are a little bit too slanted to the left). Now, the head orientations are not correct yet, especially for the guys between the 3-row and the teacher.

So, I did another one an hour later or so. I liked it much better than the last one. With the book, a lot of the stuff in the scene makes way more sense. A: The gaze directions seem to be a very important to the picture, I think. The heads on the left are in more or less correct positions, the dead body is ok. The man just above the body should be leaning more to the left. Same goes for the man at the top right. That guy also holds some kind of paper and compares it to the book. There are a couple of hands visible: the teachers, and or two of the pupils. I have no idea where they are.

So, i did this sketch immediately after the first one. It looked much better. I had no idea how to arrange the body on the table and if the feet were still in the picture. The two heads on the left are still not in the correct line. The other heads are in a better shape. Then I noted two things: The dead body is completely on the picture. Although I am not sure, the proportions and the body length seem a little short. Maybe they are studying a dead body of a person with dwarfish body proportions (there is a name for that). And there is a book on the right lower corner of the picture that everybody stares in. How could I miss that?

After staring at the picture for maybe a minute, I hid the original and tried to see what I could come up in five to ten minutes. The result is... well, hideous, to say the least. My biggest problem was to get the actual number of people in the picture right. Since they all grouped in the left upper corner I drew some imaginary lines through their heads to connect them. Analysis : The one figure I "thought" to remember well was the teacher, of whom I thought he was looking straight at the viewer. Totally wrong! He actually watches to the side. The three at the far end are above each other in a more or less straight line. The two persons on the left are actually on the same height and the two persons on the right of the line are somewhere in the space but definitively not where I drew them.

Here, I decided to try something, to improve my not-making-me-happy drawing skills. I would take a famous painting for maybe 1-2 minutes. Then I would try to scribble it down in anything from 1-10 minutes, just to see how much I would get right. I would then analyze my mistakes and compare with the original. Then I would repeat the process. As I just started this, I cannot tell how it will turn out, but so far the insight for me was amazing. For my first subject I picked the famous Rembrandt "Anatomy Class".

Didn't have time to sit down, so I did *this* in a couple of minutes.... Obviously, I strove for photorealism and perfect proportions. Sailor? Old? Crab?? ... Luckily enough, barely anybody visits this blog, so maybe I can get away with it :)