Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Life drawing 30 June






I'm beginning further study in fine arts, particularly materiality, process and horizontality. This is going to be a real challenge, going back to a kind of beginning place again, and in a way slowing down the whole process of artmaking to look at the materials and what they can do and my process.

One of my favourite models at life drawing tonight, very disciplined and able to move through poses without direction, and hold them perfectly. He likes to devise challenging poses.. both for him to hold and us to draw, but for this session we had several 20 minute simple poses to work with so I used mixed media.

They're all large A2 size drawings, done on heavy grade cream paper. First with an old brush and thin acrylic paint I very roughly painted some lines, some are quite ugly in fact, but I tried not to worry about that! I blocked in some areas with watery acrylic. Then I worked over the paper with soft and medium pastels and compressed charcoal. I ran out of white so used light colours in highlighted areas. One of the pieces has some collage on it. The room we use is a drama room at a local high school and our lighting choices are limited.

The first sketch is the only warm up I did...running late I missed the others.

It would be best to gesso the paper first next time, and have it dry, in preparation. That adds a nice weight to the paper, and helps keep it flat.

Saturday, June 19, 2010

Drawing in the dark







Again set up the model & our easels & turned the lights off. This time there was only 2 small candles lighting the model & it was quite difficult to draw just the lit areas ...These are a large pastel sketch on black sugar paper. After a while I moved & started another from the other side of the model.

Friday, June 11, 2010

Mixed media



Recently I was involved in a one day exhibition of working artists... most of us were working at the venue so that people could view our process. Many stopped to talk and ask questions, and I sold Red Nude and Dream (mixed media collage drawings).

These are a couple of works in progress I began while there, starting with the heavy printmaking paper, then adding various media, some of my own monoprint material, antique text, drawing.

Drawing with light only on the model





We put all the lights off, & had one light shining on the model. There was time for two drawings of about 10 minutes each. All these drawings are fairly large, A2 size paper, about 10 minutes each.

Drawings 12.6.10






Top pose, found it awkward to draw though I was picking the poses this evening. Pays to take a little time & walk around the model to choose a view. I then moved to start again, still wasn't happy, so drew parts of the figure.

The next pose was a quick drawing, a couple of minutes, using a piece of compressed charcoal on its side, closeup of the face & upper body. I often begin my sketches by blocking in the entire figure this way, then adding lines & then highlights & shadows if there is time.