Feel like my recent weeks have been taken over by life drawing. I joined the UAL life drawing club because I was worried that I’d miss out on important anatomy and gesture training if I didn’t get to draw in person. I go on Mondays and Sundays now, in addition to Wednesday storytelling life drawing with Mary-Clare and Thursday nights for the animator’s life drawing. This past week I also went to a pop-up life drawing event at Jazzbourne, a super classy and intimate jazz club.

That’s probably too much life drawing. I’m wary of developing the artist’s version of “fingeritis”, a thing that happens to jazz pianists where your fingers go on autopilot and play the same riffs and licks by default, your soloing becoming stale. I see mistakes in my life drawing that have become default to me (I always draw girls too muscular and chonky) and it’s a fight against my brain and my hand!

I think it’s really useful to do external life drawing in addition to animation life drawing, in which the poses are 30 seconds to 3 minutes long only.

The 10-20 minute ones are great too, because I get to slow down and really look at anatomy.