GRAHAM BERRY STUDIO

This is a tonal study for a painting I hope to be doing in the coming weeks, some days I don't feel like starting a painting, so I like to do some drawing instead.

Normally when I start a drawing  I do a rough block-in to establish it's position on the paper. I begin to establish the main directional angles of the figures form to orient it correctly in the space of the paper.

A good system to use to is the clock system, I found this in 'Expressive figure drawing' by Bill Buchman, the clock system is based on the the same idea as the compass system but since it has six basic positions for the angles or axes, it offers more precision, an example is 6'o'clock to 12'o'clock ( vertical ).

One of the good things about the clock system is that it can be refined, depending on how precise you want your directional angles to be, so you can define the angles at half hours, as in 2:30 to 8:30 creating finer angles in between the six basic ones.

Once I've established the basic drawing I also look for the

negative spaces or little shapes throughout the drawing. The sense of movement in a figure study is conveyed by the angles, direction and dynamic shapes created by the pose. When drawing remember to check your angles constantly.