Practicing figures

The professor that I had in Alfred that I was talking about in my last post had us as students doing these "drawing drills" that I absolutely hated at the time, but as time went on, I came to appreciate the fact that she made us do these drills. We would spend two hours of class time multipul times a week standing infront of our easils, and just drawing lines quickly over and over again. Going through dozens of sheets of newsprint. We moved onto cirlcles as well, and also adjusted the pressure of our charchoal on the paper.
As students we found this wastefull and pointless. But by the end of the semester we finally realized the use of these drills. Your body remembers the movement for specific shapes, it was training us to draw straight lines, to draw circles, and teaching us controll of our pencils.
The next unit we moved into figure drawing. We started off by learning the basic atatomy of the human figure. How the bones are connected, how the muscle lays on the bone, how the skin is stretched. Again we didnt see the point we were in an art class, not a Human Bio class! We started doing drills with a live model. We would have to draw the model as a stick figure. In quick 5 second drawings. The modle would change position every 5 seconds. Again we went through so much paper and we saw no point in this. But by the end of this we realized it is really teaching us how the body moves, so we can draw it in poportion. We then moved onto 10 second sketches adding a little more detail, then 20 second scetches. We added muscles onto the body for 10 second. Just with quick strokes. It was a whole new art form. (examples of these pictures are shown below.)
By the end of this semester it really made me confident that I could look at a person a draw their form in porportion accurately.