The Scarab Club in Detroit’s Cultural Center offers open life drawing sessions on Thursdays 7pm-10pm and Saturdays 10am-1pm. It’s free to students and club members, and $10 for everyone else.

I’ve went to the Thursday night session the last two weeks and have really enjoyed myself so far. I love life drawing but haven’t really done much of it since the Fall 2010 semester at Wayne State before I switched my major from Drawing to Graphic Design. I’ve set a goal to go to at least two sessions a month, and I think I’ll probably end up going pretty much every week.

Even though Drawing is not my major anymore (I really don’t feel like I fit in with the other people in the department), I still think it’s very important to keep improving on my skills. Drawing from life really hones your hand-eye coordination and improves spatial reasoning, and it’s just, well…fun! Being able to accurately draw things is still crucial in Graphic Design.

This drawing is from the January 10th session with model Sophia. I have more, but they are much larger and don’t fit on my scanner so I’ll need to photograph them on a later date when I have access to a good camera. This was a 10 minute pose. Drawn in charcoal on kraft paper.

(click image to enlarge)

I’ve drawn Sophia before at WSU and it was nice to get to draw her again at the Scarab Club. I ran into her one time at a gallery show in Hamtramck and she’s a really nice woman. I look forward to drawing her again. She has a certain elegance in the way she carries herself and the poses she chooses.

The rest of the drawings are of Brad, who modeled yesterday on January 17th. He has never modeled before which is surprising considering how good he was at staying still. He has really nice muscle definition, especially in his legs, which is fun when you’re doing contour drawings. He went to College for Creative Studies (right next door to WSU) and is a very nice guy. He was very interested in looking at everyone’s drawings and asked to take some pictures of a few students’ works, including one of my own. All of my drawings were done in fine-point marker on kraft paper.

(click any image to enlarge)

The last one is my favorite. It was a 25-minute pose. If I had more time, I would have liked to drawn the entire figure. I spent so much time hatching the legs and chair that I only had a minute to get the basic torso outline done! Time management (in drawing and in my life in general) is something I’ve been trying to improve upon this semester.