Mixed media

350gsm printmaking paper. Experimenting. Title of series: "Granite" #1 "About the Solitary", #2 "About the Wall", #3 "About a Strife in the Wood". This series is about thinking and based on an old book, "Granite" published 1909, written by John Trevena.

Doodling in my new Moleskine

I was given a voucher for Gordon Harris, an art supplies store, I bought a Moleskine...finally...and some pens. I'd checked out sources for these beautiful journals in New Zealand and I'd only found them available at Christchurch Art Gallery, so I was thrilled to find a new stand at Gordon Harris in Hamilton. Extravagantly bought the larger one - 13 x 21cm. I'm just going to doodle in it. I've a few other visual diaries on the go - for painting, design/printmaking and drawing that are pretty messy, lots of scribbly writing, bits and pieces stuck in.

These are the first two pages that I've drawn on. Actually I'm starting from the back of the book. The first drawing was of the girl on the rocks. Next day I continued on the page above, trying to link it in some way.

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...

One more life drawing

from last night. Unlike Flickr where you can add a lot of images, blogger has a limit for each post.

This is an example of a drawing where, not being happy with it and not having time to start another one, I play around with it, dabbing away on the surface. Adds texture and interest but adds nothing to the accuracy. I hope over time my accuracy in figure drawing improves, but at the moment I'm more interested in capturing the gesture of the pose and playing around with the media I'm using.

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.