A Baseline for Figure Drawing

So as part of my art re-invigorating plan I'm planning on doing a lot more life drawing, which is definitely something I never really had time to embrace. Thanks to my girlfriends(The Flying Twinkie) insistence, I ended up at the Toronto School of Art's open life drawing today, and I had a blast. Hopefully I can attend a lot over the coming year and really explore different mediums and pose lengths.

The first thing I had to do though is fight my inclination to use hard lines. I'm going to use these drawings as my baseline as I work to improve my skills in this area, hopefully I'll look at these a bit later and enjoy how far I've come.

This was a 3 hour session involving one long pose, so I ended up with a lot of similar drawings. I'm displaying the ones that I think best represent where my baseline currently is. The first being an attempt to not use hard lines so much, the second a hand study and a short drawing, and the last is a quick gesture where I modified the pose a bit.