There were problems with the animals. Dogs often assume the naked human requires washing, and when lying down on the floor, must be ill and in need of help. Bobbie had to be shut out. (i've often thought that a touchingly helpful dog could cause serious damage to someone who'd just fallen and broken their neck. I must be careful...)
I didn't eject Leo at first..
but then found i couldn't work with his misguided chaperoning.
The foreshortening was a great exercise. I will have to have a hand and foot day, though.
This was complicated but i'd like to try and work it up into a larger drawing.
I don't doubt the importance of the practice of life-drawing - i loved it when i was a student, every Friday afternoon, and i can still hear Matt Alexander's voice (from 25 years ago!) telling me to drop a plumb line, watch this or that value, look at the model not the paper. I think the reason it is such a useful exercise is simply because we are drawing our own species, we know what we are supposed to look like so it is easy to gauge precision or mistake. I like drawing cows. If we all drew cows every Friday afternoon during our art education, we'd know them better but never as intimately and intuitively - cellularly - as we know the human form.
(..... a hands, feet and hooves day...)
On a personal note, I was pleased to find that i did not pick myself to pieces when i uploaded the photographs, was merely critical of the poses and the photography for practical and aesthetic reasons. When i went out to walk the dog afterwards, i had a sense of my body being all of a piece and not a haphazard composite of less than magazine-perfect thighs, waist, breasts: having seen myself from many angles and pencilled my own outline, i felt happily natural and ripply like an animal, like beautiful Bobbie trotting unselfconsciously in front of me.
