Vanessa’s drawing workshops have been really useful! I unfortunately couldn’t attend her perspective session which is a shame, but they have all been decent refreshers for me on basic drawing fundamentals!
Due to my illustration degree and general arts education background, this was all very familiar to me, but I appreciated going through it all again; I feel like sometimes I forget to draw ‘mindfully’ and pay attention to these things, because I get so caught up in my own process. These classes have helped me to break out of that routine a little bit.

I have a tendency to focus on outlines instead of 3D form, and even though I am aware of 3D form theoretically, it isn’t something that comes naturally to me, so the workshop did well to bring my awareness back to that weakness in my drawing skills. The most useful part was certainly about ‘the bean’ and drawing the human body. I will 100% be using the bean more, and I’ve never been much of a doodler, but Vanessa’s speech on just spending time sketching the 3D fundamentals has convinced me that there is so much value in a page of funny shapes, so stay tuned for more of those!

The colour theory one was a bit too basic for me, so I’d love to take it a bit further in the future! These sessions have made me enthusiastic about regularly attending life drawing next term. It’s really hard to find a balance between rest, industry work, my job, and university assignments, and I think that is why life drawing has been sacrificed, but I think if I can even make the first hour, that would be really beneficial to my practise.