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 4 June 2008

Our life drawing group is continuing even though we are no longer being funded through community education. Thanks to John Mulvay (the tutor, who is kindly lending his easels and boards and also his home for some of the sessions and arranging models) we're continuing to meet. I missed last week's group but saw the drawings of two artists and I think it's going to be an advantage to have a variety of venue as opposed to the classroom, with furniture, cushions and other paraphernalia around.

Last night we met in the studio of artist, Robyn Tucker. It was cosy and warm, and she had arranged a chaise with nice fabric draped over the end for the model to organise her poses around/on. At the end of the session I realised, though, that I had drawn only the model and nothing around her. So she does look a little like she's floating in space in some of the drawings. Must be because I missed last week, forgot about the whole composition. Which is why regular drawing is so important.

I can see in the photographs I must clean the camera! Most of the drawings are done on buff cartridge paper, some on white. I used either a French grey conte pencil or a red chalk pencil.

The three square drawings are done on 8" x 8" canvases - I'm going to paint these, maybe mixed media works.

The upside down drawing was done standing at the head of the model, so she was upside down in my view. I forgot to draw the chaise, so it looks rather weird!

Life Drawing 14 May 2008

Here are three of tonight's drawings. The drawing on black sugar paper is done with a variety of media - compressed charcoal, conte, Neocolors, and sticks that look like conte but I think might be a dryish type of oil pastel. The drawing in the centre is on a nice buff cartridge paper with a French conte pencil, and compressed charcoals. The top drawing is done with willow charcoal - haven't used that in ages.

Our drawing class is funded in the community education classes at a local high school by the ministry of education - our town is only about 4000 people so the number of classes are a limited, and there is apparently a requirement we have 8-10 people and it looks like we might not make that. In which case the class will not continue. That is a real disappointment. Given the size of the town I would have hoped there would be some leeway to support classes like this. The fact that funding isn't consistent has got a lot to with numbers I'm sure. We had good numbers to start with, the room was full. If the class hadn't been cancelled and then started up late and at short notice I think we would have done better with numbers.

And how many tutors are there around who are prepared to bring a trailer full of easels, boards and provide clips, materials and other resources, ring around organising models and fit in with the whims of community education funding?

Waihi has a history of being a town of artists and craftspeople - a life drawing class should be well attended. Perhaps it's something to do with the demographics of the town. Are people prudish? Too cosy at home to venture out at night? Shy? Maybe people don't draw any more? Maybe. I hear the photography class is oversubscribed.

Oh well...

Printmaking experiments

Some snapshots of a few of the prints I made during the printmaking course with Bev Truloff.

The prints in the first photograph, apart from the red collograph print, are gelatin prints. When I was told we were going to try this, I took a look on the internet to see what they were all about. I wasn't that interested in them, thought it might be a good thing to do with students. BUT when we started making these little prints the next morning I loved the process! You brush thin acrylic paint or watercolour on the gelatin plate, lay over the paper and press by hand. There is something about the fluidity of the medium on the gelatin...it is so different from using ink on a hard surface to print from. The grey print is the most liquid looking of the three in the photo, the others I'd laid paint on thickly in places to see the effect. I made a lot of these little prints, it was fun.

When I went to buy printmaking paper the shop had pretty much been cleaned out and the paper that I did buy had a texture on it that didn't lend itself very well to my printmaking. I've just bought some new paper so I'm hoping to get back to the collographs this week. The red and black prints are two collographs that I made, the red printed first and the black second. I've some ideas for exploring this idea further. The green print is a probably a monoprint - I rolled the ink on the perspex plate, and then drew into the ink by laying over a paper drawing into which I'd cut lines. The coloured image in the same photo is a mixed media monoprint with watercolour and oil based ink.

Blue guitarist lacks progress

I'm just getting to grips with this site - you can post once a week during the month, after Tuesday, a photo for the theme - and it must be linked back to Self Portrait Challenge. This time I'll report on the progress - or lack of - on the blue guitarist oil painting I started recently You might be able to see my stress in the photo! It's still basically an underpainting - decided I wasn't happy with the way I had changed the stance of the model from my original photograph (elsewhere on this site and on my flickr page) so I've been working on that. And I'll have to sort out where I want the left hand to be on the frets and finalise the actual guitar before I start the top layers. But that'll have to wait until I get my ICE collages completed.

If you haven't clicked one of the links yet, you can see more blue self portraits here.