Life Drawing class #1

A couple of weeks back, I was reading Jandy Nelson's (the author of one of my favourite books 'The Sky is Everywhere') new book 'I'll give you the sun.' It was an excellent book that I instantly fell in love with and has, like her other book, inspired me. In this particular novel, it speaks a lot about art and as some readers may be aware, only recently I've been getting into sketching, and in the book there is a scene about life drawing and I was like "I want to do that" because I find it interesting drawing people and how the body can express emotion. So, as soon as I finished reading this fantastic book (which I'll write a separate post about sometime), I looked into any short life drawing courses and enrolled in one.

Today my friend and I went to the first class, with the artist running it focussing on us using charcoal. I've never used charcoal before and I absolutely love it- I am a messy person, so I ended up getting charcoal all over my hands and all over the paper, but considering I've never done life drawing before either, I'm pretty happy with how my sketches came out. So this is what I did today:

1) We began with drawing five sketches with two minutes on each different pose. I only had one piece of paper to draw on, so we had to draw over the previous, and this is what I ended up with and I have to admit, is my personal favourite:

 2) Then we drew two within the span of ten minutes each:

)
         

3) Then we had a forty minute sketch. Because we had a lot of time to draw this pose and I was used to drawing in a rush from the previous sketches, I thought I'd attempt drawing the face, which was an epic fail- I should just focus on the body in these classes, especially hands, because I cannot draw hands at all.