Mixed Media drawing

A3 cream 180gsm, compressed charcoals/pastels, acrylic Payne's Grey wash, drawn from life.

Life drawing

has been continuing again over the last couple of months... a couple of quick drawings... 18 x 24" compressed charcoal on heavy grade buff paper. I usually quickly cover the paper with some coloured pastel first which means even less time for the drawing - these are a couple of minutes long each.

Life Drawing 5 November 2008

Some of the drawings from this evening - on lightweight buff/brown paper with pastel and compressed charcoals. I roughly ran pastel over the paper before drawing to add some colour. The orange and black drawings were quick warmups.

The group gathered in a music room at a local college as our usual room wasn't available ... hence the guitars.

Life Drawing Wednesday 16 April 2008

These are the first drawings from last night's life drawing group. The class is for two hours in the evening. We're lucky enough to have the tutor provide easels, back boards, clips, and even paper and conte and charcoal to buy at cheap rates if we don't have our own.

There were a few short poses of a couple of minutes - those are the coloured pastel drawings on black building paper - then longer poses of between 10 and 15 minutes I think. I was quite rough with the soft pastel, blocking in shapes using the side of the pastel, then roughly drawing in some line on top.

There is one drawing on brown paper, in compressed black, sienna and white media. That was a difficult pose to capture. Actually there was no negative space between the left arm (as viewed on the screen) and her body, but I kind of wanted the pose more balanced. The foreshortened body was difficult. The collar bones were fantastic - I didn't get those finished.

Mixed Media portraits

This is a mixed media collage I created while working with Years 5 and 6 students at school. The activity was to create a portrait in mixed media using magazine imagery, paint, pastel, ink and maybe some other materials because we're continuing on these next week. We spent some time drawing with large crayons first - exercises like drawing the person opposite you in one minute without looking at the paper, then drawing with the other hand - that kind of thing. The next day I provided them with big pieces of nice cartridge paper, and the materials and we spent a whole morning on the portraits. Some students pick through the imagery looking at what is printed on it while others "get" the idea of looking for dark and light and colour. Some cut pieces and use it like mosaic, while others tear or cut larger pieces and just lay them down, overlapping sometimes. Some students like to leave some pieces of the paper unglued so it will curl up from the surface. The paint is thin so as not to obliterate the collage, and they're also stamping onto their work with paint on corrugated cardboard, and drawing on it with oil pastel and coloured felt pens. Most have got to a similar stage as mine, and next week we'll continue to add more media.

Pastel on black paper and spam comments !

This is drawn on black building paper which has a sheen not easy to deal with in a photograph. The media is Gallery semi hard pastels.

I've noticed that there are people spamming comments on blogs and the only way to deal with this is probably to use word verification in the settings. I would guess that the spamming is done automatically with some computer programme and up until now I don't think they can handle that but I guess the day will come. Anyway, if you see comments that say "Click here" or "See here" just don't. It comes up with some screen inviting you to activate a virus cleaner or protector or something. I did some googling to find out about these comments as I received one myself and because I have comment moderation I could see it before it was published.

Life Drawing class 2.4.08

These are a few of tonight's drawings from our life drawing class. All done in compressed charcoal on brown paper. The portrait is a quick drawing - the second pose of the night, 2 minutes I think. The first was drawing is on the same sheet of paper but I blocked it out before posting it because I wasn't at all happy with it. The drawings have been photographed at night with a flash so not the best. I'll post another tomorrow which was drawing on black paper and can't be photographed at night.

For most of my drawings tonight I used the charcoal on it's side, blocking in the forms, looking at negative spaces and geometric shapes in the form of the body, then started working up the dark areas. I most often draw in lines at that point, and sometimes add white charcoal or a third colour. I like red but have run out so am using a sienna colour conte.

I should spend more time being more systematic about proportions, and I get lost sometimes focusing on something like a foot or the face, or a shadow, and then lose my proportion ending up with an elongated chest or a head out of proportion! I've been taught a few ways to do this - the body is x number of heads long...the midpoint is....put in dots at points like the side of the head, neck, shoulders etc...use one's pencil (I don't use a pencil) and hold out your arm to measure...I have no patience for those...maybe I should learn some!

Drawing

Someone commented on my blog that I was brave to share my life drawings. Not at all. I post them for a few reasons, mainly to show the art that I'm doing at the moment and not just finished pieces. Although my drawings are a resource for my art, sometimes they inspire a painting (Warm Winter for instance), I draw for the sake of drawing. I love it. I think it's something anyone and everyone can and should do. Another reason is so other people can see there are so many ways to attempt a drawing but the main thing is to have a go. In drawing classes there are so many different styles among the participants. Everyone has a preference for a particular media - some like to draw with a pencil and sharpen it frequently - and there are so many different types of pencil to try - graphite, charcoal, chinagraph to mention a few. I particularly like my red chalk pencil. Then charcoal - some people love willow charcoal, I seem to use compressed a lot. I just took a photo of some of the things in the box of materials I take to life drawing class - some semi-hard coloured pastels are useful for a change, nice on black paper. I need to buy some more compressed graphite and charcoal and conte, I struggled this week with those little bits! You can see I've got a really big piece of willow charcoal that's fun to draw with. And white - compressed and in pencil form, are other items I use regularly.

One of the class participants commented to the tutor that she likes the "zone" she gets into when drawing over the two hours. I know what she means. And when I go into the studio it takes me an hour or so to get into that "zone". When I come downstairs at the end of a few hours I feel like my head is in another place and it takes a while before I'm all there! Must be something to do with that left brain/right brain thing...

Life Drawing

These are some of last night's drawings (though I hesitate to show some with their wrong proportions). I've used Gallery semi-hard pastels on black building paper, compressed charcoals and conte on white cartridge paper. We weren't able to use our usual room for last night's class and the replacement was a smaller room, long and narrow, so it wasn't so easy to move around and find a different viewpoint.

I think the longest drawing was 15 minutes. I felt like creating loose drawings last night, used the pastel/charcoal on its side quite often. It's difficult to stop with a drawing. Sometimes I get something I like then spoil it by continuing to draw on it. I'd done a very quick drawing using charcoal on its side of the seated pose. I then started to draw lines on it and at that moment I realised what was on the paper had captured something of the model and I should have left it alone.

Another thing I do when I'm not sure if I'm happy about the drawing, or feel I've got it out of proportion is to start adding tone with light, dark or midtone, making short, sharp or scribbly lines. Last night I worked the charcoal into the paper and thought that was starting to work.