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.

More life drawings

Life Drawing Class April 9 2008 - Male model

Here are most of the drawings I did last night. There were a few 1 minute drawings done with a black marker pen on white cartridge - only one posted here. It's a great pen to use to force one to decide what the line is going to be and draw it - no going back! I'll do more of these in the future.

The coloured pastel drawing was just a crazy drawing I decided to do after I'd walked around the model and couldn't decide from which position to draw. After teaching all day I'm not terribly energetic, and most of the time I just place the easel and stay there, moving it only a little sideways. Also, I seem to have forgotten whether I like to draw looking to the left of my paper, or the right!? (I'm right handed ... anyone got advice? Had no trouble deciding last year.) The class tutor reminds us to walking around before deciding where to place yourself to draw.

Most of the drawings are done with conte and compressed charcoal sticks. The sienna colour is rather harsh - one of those drawings where I started fiddling around, scribbling, rubbing in, cross hatching, layering over white ... and ending up in a mess. I do quite like drawings, though, that are closer to finished in one area and less so in others.

Again, due to the limitations of the blog, I'll have to post the remaining photographs in a separate post.

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!

Blue Guitarist oil painting

This is a real departure for me. Painting very large, in oils. It's based on a photograph I took of a musician (the photograph is one of the flickr slideshow showing on this blog). I'm streamlining him somewhat - changed the baggy jeans to tight ones. Changed his stance a little which has got me into trouble with the guitar but I'll get there in the end. So far I've stretched and gesso'ed the canvas, roughly drawn in my composition, and laid down thin layers of acrylic underpainting, and begun the layers of oil paint which I've never used before. I want it to be more abstract, but as usual I fiddle around and end up on a path to a realistic image while I'm laying in the building blocks of the painting. I need to leave the details alone for the moment. Once I've got the basic thing painted in oils, I'll see what I can do to jazz it up. The guitarist was standing in front of a large screen with music videos running silently and I caught this one with the female face floating there. The photographs I took that night were out of focus because I didn't want to use a flash - no atmosphere - and long exposure without a tripod and with the movement of the guitarist as he played doesn't make for a good clear photo But I liked some of the shots I got, especially this one, and with a friend offering the use of his studio for a week and having the space to paint big, thought I'd have a go at something different from my usual work. It's a brave thing I do posting a work in progress but it creates some pressure to continue to work on it.