After our assignments of drawing numerous dummies in various positions we missed out on drawing a nude model. My drawings of dummies had been rather uninspired so I wasn't too bothered about not needing to draw the nude model. I never really cared for drawing people anyway. I rarely drew a person, it was always things I was interested in.

The thing was though, we now had the assignment to draw a person from an iconic pose. If there's one person who's always done all sorts of iconic poses it's Michael Jackson, and after browsing through some magazines I found the picture I'd use. I really didn't want to do this one, being fully aware on how I was pretty bad at drawing people. I created the outlines with a pencil, then did the real drawing with charcoal. I really, really liked the pants, but not so much his right arm, hence there being a lot of black there as you can't really erase charcoal from a picture.

After I'd fixed the arms I gave the rest of the body some shading I was done. It took me 30 minutes to draw this one and I felt I'd outdone myself. The remarkable thing is though that this kind of drawing was really encouraged by teachers, though once I went to teaching school the first thing they tried to do when I had to draw people again was trying to get rid of the technique I'd taught myself. I'd found this picture by accident, had no idea I'd saved it, though when looking at the sketches of people I made around that period (which are not on this site for obvious reasons) it became pretty clear why I'd saved this one.