So, I got behind on posting this past week because of a horrendous work schedule. I worked every spare hour I wasn't in class or doing schoolwork. But, I'm back and next week's schedule looks much better!

On Monday, Santa posed for us! The combination of his extreme Santa-like appearance, his overly dramatic poses, and his small (ahem) pecker were even more distracting to me than Elrond and his piercings.

I took my small 5x7 sketchbook to class as instructed and the teacher gave us a new weekly assignment: We are to draw five sketches from memory of a figure in their surroundings, paying close attention to the details of the environment around the figur,e each week. Yikes! This is my biggest weakness! I find it almost impossible to draw from memory. I'm not even sure my "big-picture" brain captures the details. What am I going to do?! We will be turning the entire sketchbook in every Monday.

We did the usual gesture drawings and I found his dramatized posing quite hilarious. They were, of course, too quick for me to capture properly, but I'm trying to get faster. Not very successful yet. I do feel better when I look around at the drawings of others and see that I'm not the only one struggling. At least she hasn't taken away the model after the first minute like she did a few weeks ago and tell us to finish it without a reference. 

After the gesture drawings, came a half-hour pose, which I can't find so you don't get to see it. I'm sure it wasn't good anyway.

The hour-long pose was last, like usual. I've decided to always use the expensive paper for the long pose, instead of newsprint, because it turns out nicer. I also moved to the other side of the room for this drawing because I've noticed that the model almost always faces away from me and most of my drawings are of their backs. I think they like facing the door. And as always, I ran out of time and the drawing was far from complete!