"Girl with folded legs looking up" Graphite pencil female figure drawing

Artist

Matthew James Taylor

Medium

Graphite pencil

Date

29 Oct 2007

Creation time

15 minutes

Tags

Drawings

Figure drawing

Foreshortening

Nudes

Pencil drawings

The female form

Comments by the artist

This is the first time I've done life drawing in about a year. I was a bit rusty at first but after about five or six drawings I started to loosen up. I used my favourite short charcoal pencils sharpened in a bullet point style for the first few drawings - they give a fairly sketchy line on the rough paper. Then I switched to a HB sharpened to a needle point. I find that when I make the change to such a fine point I suddenly have all this extra detail to play with and my drawings become a lot more accurate. This is great for a while but if I use them for too long I tend to get bogged down in the details and I have to switch back to charcoal to loosen up again.