Online life drawing

I love life drawing, but all classes were cancelled during the lock down. There was a huge boom in life drawing via Zoom, with models desperate to carry on working somehow. I’d never done it before, but it does feel a bit like very soft porn at first. Looking at naked people over the Internet. But it works.

There seem to be two approaches. Live or saved videos of models posing, or still photos to work from. Pros and cons to both. One definite pro is that models can adopt extremely foreshortened poses, with the camera below their feet or over their heads or in very difficult/unstable poses which they can’t hold for more than a few seconds. These are just a few. There are so many that I have been binding them into collections.

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Just a sample of work from online model sessions.

Saturday drop in life class

At Keith Simmons life class in Stroud. Could have been a disaster as the model rang up to say her car had broken down on the motorway and burst into flames! Don’t know how she sorted that, but Keith’s wife stepped in at short notice, so we had a good session. I am endlessly frustrated by my output. I can’t get proportion right to my satisfaction and I try too many media, which often don’t work together. Just have to soldier on.

Thursday drawing

I was not pleased with these after I drew them, but in reflection they aren’t so bad. I am not a flower artist…

The flowers are actually under the muslin, which was our first exercise, just using white chalk on black paper.

Then all was revealed and I floundered, trying a pastel drawing of the whole lot. It really didn’t go anywhere.

So finally I just drew the hyacinth in charcoal, and when it looked reasonable, I scrubbed in some pastel colour. I find the problem with floral painting is that there is no anatomy or structure I can wrap my mind round, so my hand doesn’t know what it is trying to do.

By the pool

This is a study in pure charcoal drawing. The body is blocked in with charcoal powder on cotton wool. Then highlights taken out with a putty rubber and shadows put in with stick charcoal. I have been trying out the outrageously marketed and priced Nitram charcoal. It is OK, but no more than that. It is not as black as compressed charcoal, which I used on her hair, or a subtle as willow charcoal, which I used almost everywhere else. I’ll stick with it, to give it a fair run, but can’t say I’m initially impressed.

Saturday drop in life class at Stroud College of Arts and Sience

I went to Keith Simmons Saturday session as I am getting very rusty at drawing. A very good model, who I have drawn several times before. And a relief to be drawing a young woman for a change, rather than an odd assortment of old men, which seems to have been the staple for the last few weeks. A range of media, from pastel pencil, through charcoal to simple pencil. I think pencil works better on a smaller scale, so I must try that sometime. I just tend to fill the page, whatever size it is.

Drawing and painting

After two weeks in Tanzania, I have produced just one painting. Of zebras, which fascinate me. Done from a photo as it was not possible on the move. Acrylic on a small canvas.

Back home at Susan Kester’s drawing class. A fabric study in charcoal. It started out terrible, but got better.

Tuesday life class at New Brewery Arts

Back at Mark Kelland’s life class. I shall miss a couple, but it is good to be working to a structure. Using just charcoal and chalk today. The model was keen to adopt dramatic poses. To be fair, he was very good at holding them. These are the two 20 minute poses. We did several other quick warm up sketches.

Susan Kester drawing class

E were working in charcoal this week. Rubbing it in to blacken the paper, drawing into that with a rubber to create the basic shapes and finally adding some white chalk for highlights. Drawing eggs and stripes…

Japanese woodcut

I’ve just completed an excellent two day workshop at Ardington School Of Crafts run by Laura Boswell. An introduction to Japanese woodblock printing. An art form I love but I have never tackled before.

I started with an image of pine trees falling into the sea on the end of Furzey Island in Poole Harbour. I photographed it last week and even did a sketch of it in charcoal whilst sitting cross legged on the roof of my boat.

Laura took us through the stages of breaking the design down into blocks which would build up the image. These are carved on both sides of the wood block and coloured using horse hair brushes, watercolour paint and rice paste.

The blocks are printed onto damp paper, using a baren to burnish the back. I produced several multicoloured images and a final, fairly rushed one just in blue, which is very traditional.

It’s a fascinating technique. These results aren’t that great, but they are a starting point. Hokusai, here I come…

Drawing class with Susan Kester

I’ve started a series of drawing sessions with Susan Kester in Chalford. Just drawing what is in front of us, with guidance from her. I used charcoal to produce this plant, which is quite reasonable I think.