For those one of you who have been wondering how I've been spending my days now that I'm unemployed (one week and counting!), I thought I'd share the schedule I've managed to fall into. Now that I'm getting serious about my art, I want to start doing more and more work in order to get myself used to the routine I'll need to keep up once I get to school this fall, and afterwards as I start doing it for a living.

First off is gesture drawing. I try to do 10 30-second fast sketches via the timed viewer at Posemaniacs, which is an amazing site. However, I generally lose count, so it's normally anywhere from 12-15. This helps in a number of ways, first of all as a good warmup to get the creative blood flowing. Aside from that, it's a great way to learn to recognize and reproduce the large shapes of the body in a very short time, and to work decisively. After not even a week of doing this, I've already given myself a much better grasp of how the torso fits together and how the legs join to the body at a number of different angles. With those in mind, I'm starting to turn my eye towards the shoulders and how the arm fits to the body, which has been something I've been trying to conceptualize.

Next comes my daily blind contour drawing. This is more difficult work, and I time myself at 20 minutes a day. The idea is that without looking at the paper, my hand reproduces what my hand sees, moving along the contours of a form. In this case, my hand. Not to say outline, that's a different concept, but following the lines of the hand as well as the outline, and there are loads of places where you follow the outer edge of a line that turns naturally inward into a form. This teaches a lot about hand-eye co-ordination and the shapes and depth of forms. It's good foundation work. My life drawing instructor basically set the class to do this for 20 minutes a day for one month, and see what effect it's had on their drawing and how much their contour drawings have improved. So far it's been 11 days, and things are still rough, but I'm getting a lot of the concepts internalized, which is the point. Not that I intend to stop at the end of 30 days, but that's a good point to self-assess.

After that, it's another session of gesture drawing, followed by sketching concepts and anatomy studies in a more or less free fashion for the rest of the day. Right at the moment I'm working out of the amazing anatomy text by Gottfriend Bammes. Pity it's entirely in German, but copying from his plates and following some of the concepts he lays down in illustrations is quite informative.

Lastly comes the 30-minute timed sketch, often preceded by another session of 30-second drawings. These are the ones I've been showing here, and to me they're a snapshot of where my ability stands. Once again, these take me back to the Posemaniacs site, and their random pose viewer. I don't know what I'm going to get, and I generally pick the first pose that comes up, unless it's not very suitable for drawing (too much obscured, mostly). After that, if I feel like doing more I'm free to, but that's largely my day.

I made the decision this morning that I'm only going to do the gesture and blind contour drawings on weekends, and I'll set those aside to have a little fun with what I'm doing. Like going out if it's nice and drawing what I find, or working on projects in a more leisurely fashion. That may change, but it seems like a good balance.

So that's about it. Give me a month, we'll see how effective it all is.