Figure Drawing

In this class, students took turns posing in the middle of a circle, while rest of the class drew them. Each pose was 30 seconds. One after the other group called on each other, and as the class went on the poses grew more and more expressive and daring. Everyone wanted to see how the rest of the class had drawn them.

This exercise really bonded the group. As women in the neighbouring barracks saw what was happening, they came to out watch the class. Some asked for paper and joined in. Others pushed their way into the middle of the circle to pose so their fellow prisoners could draw them.

From our first figure drawing class in the women’s prison

We wanted them to start to organise and compose, make stories and spaces from their drawings. So for the second half of the class, we gave each person a prompt — draw a park, a funfair, a circus, a classroom — and asked them to use the poses they had come up with as a “bank” of ideas to fill up the page and create a busy, congested space, like in Where’s Wally and similar illustrations. The goal was just to practice drawing lots of figures, without worrying too much about the details

The men’s prison has done a figure class in the past and it was a huge success. I’d wanted to try it in the women’s but was holding back because we don’t have enough drawing boards. Ideally I would have loved to introduce figure drawing on large sheets of paper with charcoal so that we could also get into form, shadows and gesture.

Nevertheless, we broke through the hesitation our class has had in drawing the human form. Because the limitation here was time, speed and not perfection was was the focus of each drawing.