Review: observational drawing workshop by Victoria Jinivizian

Getting to grips with figure drawing
In October, professional artist Victoria Jinivizian gave members of Lacock Art Group an informal workshop in observational drawing at one of our Thursday evening meetings.  Her model, Emma, accompanied Victoria along with some furniture props – a chair and stool.

​It was a great session, hugely informative (especially for those with little experience of figure drawing), challenging at times - total concentration required - and, above all, a lot of fun.

Victoria taught us some essential techniques about how to approach figure drawing, and Emma, her model, positioned herself in several different poses for exercises for the class to tackle. ​

​​The session started with Emma in a standing posed. Victoria’s first piece of advice was how to get the body proportions correct; by making three horizontal marks on your paper – one to indicate the top of the head, one at the model’s feet, and a third at waist level. She suggested we focus on four principles when figure drawing; height, width, angle (of limbs), and shape.

Some seriously studious participants!

Next Emma posed sitting on a stool and Victoria asked us to apply the same principles and tips discussed above. The stool offered a perfect opportunity to put negative space/drawing into practice (you can read more about this in our blog by Chris Crosby about this technique posted at the end of September). Here are a few examples of the drawings produced in the first two exercises, kindly provided by some of our members.

By Glyn Overton

By Elspeth Wales

By Joy Tickell

Challenging exercises
After easing us in gently with the first two poses, Victoria set us a more challenging exercise: drawing the figure without lifting your pen/biro off the paper, in one continuous line. Everyone found this very hard to do in practice but we were all more-or-less pleasantly surprised at the results! The aim of the exercise was to help develop skills in drawing the overall shape of the figure. You can see a couple of the end results below and in the sketch above by Joy Tickell, the figure on the far right of the three. 

By Graeme McFaull

Don't look down!
​To stretch us even further Victoria’s next exercise involved drawing “blind”. The task was to draw the figure, using a pencil, looking constantly at the model, without looking down at the paper on which we were drawing. In this exercise Emma was sitting on a stool. The purpose of this exercise was to encourage you to study the model closely and continuously in detail. All agreed that this proved to be the hardest of all the exercises! The results were mixed – we suspect some people couldn’t resist a sneak peek at their paper! Interestingly, members appeared reluctant to share these drawings for the blog. Perhaps the attempt shown below on the right explains why, although apparently this is what the drawing is supposed to look like in this exercise!

By Tracy Warne

By Elspeth Wales

Strike a different pose
Attendees sat around the outer edges of the room with the model positioned in the centre, as you can see in this photo. Therefore, to ensure that everyone had the chance to draw the model from the front and back, Emma changed her pose a number of times. 

​For the last two drawings of the session Emma posed sitting on a chair. At this point Victoria explained how to use the background in the scene to ‘ground’ the model in the space, which helps to get the proportions of the drawing right. For example, the model was sitting on a chair and we observed where the floor met the walls and drew a line on the paper to represent this.  Using this approach helps to position the model in the right place within the space. The drawing below demonstrates this technique very well.

By Richard Newsome

Margaret, a founder member of LAG, enjoying a well-earned break during the session!

​We each produced six drawings in total during the workshop, with Emma in different poses, and Victoria gave us about 15 minutes to complete most of them. We had a little longer for the final drawing so that we could put in more detail. This featured Emma sitting on a chair, leaning forwards with her head propped up by her arm, which was quite a tricky pose to draw. A couple of examples drawn on the night are below.

By Graeme McFaull

By Lynn Pick

To sum up, we all found Victoria’s drawing class a thoroughly enjoyable experience and one that provided us with a welcome challenge. It was good to try something different. Our thanks go to Victoria and to her model, Emma, for delivering such a useful and fun evening, and also to those of our members who provided images of their drawings to illustrate this article.

You can find out more about Victoria’s work on her website. Please do take a look at it.
Thank you.

Next Lacock Art Group demo 
Our next demo, which is open to non-members of LAG, is by Catherine Beale on Thursday 24 November. More information about this is featured in a previous post here on our blog.