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.
Very early in the lockdown, when we were all meant to stay home, our local art shop, Pegasus Art (Pegasusart.co.uk) set a daily challenge to keep us focused. I didn’t do all of them, but they were a stimulus, which was welcome. These are a selection of what I produced.
Old Harry Rocks from Studland Beach. Pastel pencil on boardSikkimese prayer flags. Pastel pencil on board. Skinny dipping in the sunshine. Acrylic on canvas. (I gave this picture to the swimmer)Self portrait. Pastel pencil on boardDonkey. Soft pastel on Canson paperCarcassonne. Pencil sketchSummer’s day. A really poor digital sketch.
Art classes have stared again for the second half of the term. In the mixed media sessions we were trying to use frottage to add texture to dry drawings. Basically bras rubbings as back ground. to give you some texture. A good idea, but my rubbings were so pale and I covered them with so much scribbling that you couldn’t really see them. It was good to work from real things. We had various bits of dried vegetation and I chose the teasles as they are local and important around here, being used in the weaving industry.
The big pictures were fun, but the two little ones of individual flower heads were better.
We had a heap of over 30 animal skulls from the local art college. We had to draw them in a range of media. First, five skulls in dry media. Graphite, dry pigment, chalk, coffee and just a little ink work
Then take one skull and fill the page with it, using household emulsion paints ad ink applied with a large feather. Some was done with the tip of a quill, but most was done with the feathery end. There were a few minutes left at the end, so I sketched in a little one in the empty corner.
It is a very mixed media class. I’m the only man there.
JEGS ART 