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.

Lockdown printing

This work started before lockdown, but was only completed well into that time here in England. A multiblock linocut on Chinese rice paper that I called Dance of Hope. The central figure is in the Nataraja pose against a Sikkimese endless knot. This was a Bhudist symbol we saw everywhere in Sikkim in February, a time which seems a life time ago, but was only earlier this year. Hand burnished with a wooden spoon, this is the largest print I have made to date. Until I put the final black layer on, I thought it was a complete failure, the colours just didn’t contrast enough. But with the black it just worked. I only produced about five as hand burnishing is really slow and the paper is very fragile.

One copy is framed at the top of our stairs.

Tuesday lifeclass

An excellent evening with a wonderful model who had come from Bristol by train. That involved getting a bus from Swindon when the train was cancelled. Dedication. I tried charcoal, two-colour pencil and then a quick sketch just in pencil. As always, the quick sketch looked best, but I felt it was very incomplete

Our model had extraordinary tattoos. I often don’t draw tattoos as I think they can detract from the modelling of the body. But in her case, I felt she was incomplete without them. It isn’t up to me to decide how she should be seen. She clearly had her own ideas of how we should see her. I didn’t have much record of her tattoos, but photos on her Instagram account gave me the basics, and the rest I made up. Whether it is a better drawing, I can’t say, but it is much more her than the plain sketch.

Life class drawings

I’ve been attending the Stroud Life Class drop in Saturday sessions quite regularly this autumn. They have had a succession of excellent models, which is such a good experience.

Here I have tried the classic the colour approach, but I haven’t really got the hang of it. I don’t use the paper colour as much add I should.

Here I have tried a careful pencil rendering, but concentrating on the head and hand.

I usually don’t try to draw tattoos. I don’t really know how to, even though most models seem to have them now. But i couldn’t ignore this glorious snake, and I loved the pose, with shoulder shoved right up

Life class

I’ve stopped going to the life classes at New Brewery Arts in Cirencester this year. I had become tired of the lack of variety in the models. We kept getting the same ones again and again. I’ve been compensating by going to the Saturday afternoon drop in life sessions at the Centre for Arts And sciences in Stroud, run by Keith Simmons. He seems to get an endless stream of new models every week. The most recent was an excellent young woman from Argentina, who was modelling for, I think, the first time, in place of her boy friend. He was the planned model, but had a rotten cold so was sitting the session out as one of the drawers. These images cover a few sessions over the last few weeks.

Degas copies

I often go through phases where I just want to copy work by an artist I admire. I very much admire Degas, and recently bought a catalogue of an exhibition of his nudes held in Boston a few years ago. They are astonishing. I’ve been exploring them in pencil. The more I look, the more I am amazed.

Afternoon life class

Working on pastels today, with an excellent model. The same one we had for the workshop on “Drawing Like Raphael”. Can hold a difficult pose and looks very renaissance, if you ignore the tattoos and, shall we just say, acoutriments. First a white chalk structural drawing, then colour applied and blended in, which would not be my chosen technique, but it can work.

Andromeda reimagined

We had a wonderful model in Stroud last week, who held a difficult sitting pose over three hours. I was pleased with the way she came on, drawn entirely in pencil, but at the end, I had clearly squeezed her legs in, spoiling the proportions,and gave her a rather sour expression, which was quite unjust.

So I took her home and set to work. First, added a strip of matching paper at top and bottom so I could correct her legs and complete her head. Then I reworked nearly the entire drawing, until I was generally happy with her look. That is one of the joys of pencil and graphite. If you use good quality pencils and paper, you can rub out and rework endlessly. It actually seems to improve the drawing, giving it a deeper overall look. I thought that the studio cushions looked a bit like rocks, so went to town on them, and she quickly became Andromeda, sitting on the rocks at the edge of the sea.

But this Andromeda isn’t the poor sacrificial girl in Burne Jones painting that I copied a few months ago. She was forced to wait in chains to be claimed by Perseus, if he won, or be eaten by the dragon if he lost. My girl has got shot of chains, and Perseus, and is thinking what she plans to do next. I think she may suggest to the dragon that he goes and has a frank discussion with her parents as to why exactly they had changed up their daughter on the beach.

Saturday life class drop in session

Spent a pleasant afternoon at the Lansdown drop in life class. Very good model, who everybody enjoyed drawing. She said she ached terribly after sitting stock still for three hours. I decided to do just a single, detailed pencil drawing, which is not usual for me. Just a little bit of highlighting with white chalk, which doesn’t really show.

Tuesday life class

Working purely in graphite again. A good model at last, and in fact a lady I know from my swimming club. We did two, long drawings. The first was not all that great, but I quite liked this scribbled one, with some of the studio context. I used a 9B graphite stick which I bought in Brooklyn, which is lovely for fast sketches.