People are boxes. And a growing sock.

On Friday evening I had the first of ten beginner's life drawing classes.

It was a cosy little group of about eleven of us, which included the teacher's partner. Apparently she's been coming to the classes for years to help out with the setting up and tidying away, and making tea in the break, but never actually done any drawing. And she thought it was about time she tried it out.

Some people had lots of drawing experience, and others (like me) had almost none. But we all started from the very beginning, which meant drawing great big white wooden boxes stacked on top of each other at weird angles, and then trying to see the human body as a series of cubes - one for the head, one for the torso and one for the pelvis, and we had to draw the model in various poses represented by these cubes. It was a lot harder than it sounds. Homework is to draw several printouts of old masters' drawings using this cube business.

There was an outstanding variety of tea and coffee to to guzzle, and very very impressive biscuits including some gorgeous coconut things with jammy middles. I think you can judge the quality of a class by the biscuits provided. Loop in Islington is another place that gets a thumbs up in this department.

Here's some of the boxes stacked up - the first exercise we did. It was about thirty seconds per sketch.

And these are some of the "people boxes". I actually had to do a couple of "proper" sketches of the model to work out which way her pelvis was pointing as it wasn't always immediately obvious.

And just to totally change the subject, in my second ever blog post back in December of last year, I posted about sock knitting. My very first knitted sock, in fact, and how I had just started and had always been scared of sock knitting. Well since that blog post, I never ever picked up that sock again. Till today, that is. And now I'm almost finished! All the hard bits are done, and I'm wondering why I ever thought they were difficult. I only wish I'd finished them before we had this awful cold weather so I could have got the benefit from them!