Life Drawing 18.6.08

Life drawings this week...not all of them. Was rather tired after working that day, so wasn't at my best. All done on A2 white cartridge paper in pen. I was using a great calligraphy pen for the seated pose, and it ran smoothly over the paper - pity I couldn't capture the model well, he was very relaxed in the chair and it doesn't show in this drawing.

Work in progress

I've started painting the three small drawings I drew on canvas at last week's life drawing group. I'd used a grey French conte pencil, and have started painting in Atelier Interactives. I think they're going to take a while as I'm going to have many thin layers of paint, not sure at this point if I will use other media, or what I'll do for the background! My resident critic liked the light backgrounds, but I like the strong negative space. Who knows what it will be in the end!

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!

10th Annual International Collage Exhibition & Exchange is online

It's always a thrill to see this exhibition go online. 159 artists from Japan to USA, from Denmark to New Zealand, from Australia to France & Romania, make 13 collages - one is exhibited online and at the TART Gallery in New Plymouth, New Zealand. It then travels overseas to be exhibited at and become part of the collection of the Amarillo Museum of Art in Texas. There is also an online exhibition of one collage from each artist that is for sale - do take a look!

I leave it to the organiser and curator of the exchange and exhibition, Dale Copeland (see my links) to choose which of my collages she would like to exhibit and put up for sale - so it's always a surprise for me to see which of the 13 she has chosen. She chose High Dance of Innocence for the exhibition that will travel to Texas, and An Appropriate Contract for sale.

At some stage I'll receive a large envelope containing 11 collages from other artists. Dale is incredibly organised and in the past we've received a list that cross matches our collages to the receiver. I'll be waiting for that list because the very last collage I made wasn't photographed. I was working at night and meant to photograph it in the morning, clean forgot about it, and now I can't even remember the title! So hopefully the eventual owner of that collage will be kind enough to send me a photo of it.

I haven't painted for a while. The first part of the year my thoughts were only on making the collages. Now I've started life drawing and again it's taking me a while to settle back into paint. Lots of ideas in my mind though.

I'm also booked into a printmaking workshop at the end of the month (Design is one of my majors and printmaking will be part of that work). This is not convenional printmaking though. The course is described as "Experimental Printmaking with an organic approach". The title and the list of materials is very interesting. The tutor is Bev Truloff. Click on her name to see some of her work.

Life drawing class 26 April 2008

I wasn't very happy with what I drew on this evening - but I'll post some anyway. I ran out of large white cartridge paper, and used a cheap Chinese watercolour paper that was quite textured. It would be interesting to take a charcoal drawing further with this paper and put watercolour washes on it. I was happiest with the conte on black building paper. This was a pose I'd requested because it was similar to the one I used for the painting Extracts from Trapped Self. In that painting the figure is twisted slightly to the left and forearm rests on the thigh. I wanted to draw it again, this time from another viewpoint.

I changed the photograph of the seated pose into a negative and like the way it turned out. Hopefully my drawings will be useful as a resource in my paintings and playing around with them in a photo programme can help me look at them in a different way.