In some respects, drawing from life is one of the more difficult things an artist can ask of himself or herself. At first you think that it should be fairly straightforward, but it's not. If you're drawing from a live model, you find that all of those construction tips that you've learned from "how to draw" books are valuable, but at some point they simply aren't enough. You're not drawing from a manniquin or a doll. You're drawing something much more organic. The bones inside of the figure give it a regular structure, but the muscles, tendons, layers of fat (however thin they might be), etc. cause the human body to take some amazing and unexpected shapes.
The warm up sketches I'm posting here aren't particularly good or bad - they're just typical of what my pencil can find over the course of a one minute pose. Often, I'll start with the oval shape of the head, then move on to small indicators marking the model's features and which direction he or she is facing. That's often followed by a contour line meant to trace the shape of the spine, and then everything else is connected to that.
The drawing above was done in about an hour with my current favorite drawing "pencil," a Faber-Castell B6 graphite crayon.
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