I’m a big sucker for a good challenge. Not that I always succeed, but I don’t beat myself up for not living up to a set goal. You failed? Well, there’s always tomorrow. Pick yourself up and try again.

So, February holds a huge figure drawing challenge – Figuary. It’s the brainchild of Love Life Drawing and the Croquis Cafè (I will add links to their sites at the end of this post.) Everyday you’ll find a video with some live poses (nude of course, cause it’s about studying human anatomy) for you to draw. First some 1-minute warm up poses, then there were 2-minute poses, and to finish off a 5-minute pose. There are also videos of Love Life Drawing with tips and instructions on how to tackle that task. Pause the video any time you like, or go along with the real life simulation. And believe it or not, the whole thing is free.

The Croquis Café is a site that provided videos and a model database for free. Now that in the times of the plague and lockdowns they got floaded with page and video requests, they started charging for their service. Not much, still worth that money if you enjoy figure drawing and are looking for good quality pics with a huge variety of poses, imho. Anyway, for this art challenge, the provide the daily video for free. So even if you don’t want to support them or don’t have the means to do so, you can draw along in Figuary.

I find life drawing, and even drawing after videos a bit challenging. Compared to drawing the same poses after photographs. Even if the model sits very still, those micro movements throw me off. But let’s see if my quick sketches get any better towards the end of the month. Practice is everything after all! 😉

Today I’ve been sketching on a cheap A5 sketch pad from Creabox / Marabu. The paper is light grey and has a a nice texture. With 135 g/m2 it’s not too thin either. Most of the sketches I did with an ArtGraf water-soluble pencil in 2B, and smoothed the lines out with my waterbrush in the end. The other ones were done with a Goldfaber pencil in HB.