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.

Charcoal sketch

Just playing around on one of the mixed media backgrounds. Charcoal pencil and willow charcoal. 10 x 14 inches on heavy grade rag paper with ink and acrylic paint.

Sunday at John's

I have to take my camera next week and photograph the amazing etching presses John is building and engineering. Anyway, I actually remembered to go today (forgot last week - "Sunday School" in John's studio for local artists who care to get together and spend a few hours working in company). I worked on more backgrounds, not very exciting to view.. but am enjoying the layering up of the surfaces. Then I started drawing over a couple of them. Just getting started. I noticed some shapes in the colours so began to draw from those, so a lot more to do yet.

Mixed Media drawing

Acrylic and oil paints, and charcoal pencil on 50% cotton rag paper.
"Dark Legend". The oil paint was accidental. I thought I'd picked up watercolour. But it was a happy accident, though I had to deal with the brush straight away. Was aiming to put a black wash over part of the base, there are several layers of acrylic wash. Ended up brushing over the oil paint and using it to add texture.

Another character from my stories.

Life Drawing 26 November 2008

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I've been meaning to create some collaged paper to take to drawing and finally I managed to throw some things together yesterday. I used a good quality printmaking paper to have sturdy background, and used binder medium to apply old text (from my collection of 100+years old books acquired specifically to use in artworks), and papers from magazines and scrapbooking materials. On top of that I quickly brushed some acrylic paint with medium to thin it down. Because it was done in such a hurry there are wrinkles and lumps.

I did three drawings using some of these as a base, and it was an interesting exercise. I can see I have to take care about where dark pieces are placed. I had one interesting dark piece of paper that I don't want to obliterate, but to enhance the drawing I'll have to lift that area out with light media of some kind. I might work on with these pieces at home, using modelling paste and paints, pastels etc. The bases are sturdy enough for that. I used a stick of graphite which was good to work with but doesn't photograph well and tends to reflect light. It might be a better idea to begin with willow charcoal and then moved to a more solid media once the basic drawing is blocked in, willow would wipe of the surface quite easily if I wanted to make changes. I'm thinking 'aloud' here.

The other two drawings are on A2 cartridge paper, the warmup drawings and then one quick drawing blocked in roughly with soft pastel.