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.

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.

A long love affair with a drawing

Just over two years ago I produced one of my favourite drawings at a life class. I called her Neuroscience because she actually was a neuroscientist, taking a gap, working at an art centre between finishing her bachelor’s degree and starting her master’s.

I love the relaxed pose and the thoughtful expression. I’ve put her into an exhibition and was relieved that she didn’t sell. I don’t really want to part with her.

I’ve based more works on this image than any other I have done. The first was a mixed media work, with rectangles of handmade paper pasted onto a canvas and then over-painted with acrylic.

There was no plan to this image, I had no idea what I was going to do, but I loved the outcome. With a great imaginative flair, I called her Neuroscience 2. She hangs in our bathroom, which seems appropriate for a nude.

Next I tried a pastel on pastel board. Quite a different effect and I love the colour, but it’s not my favourite of the series. Yes, Neuroscience 3…

After that I discovered relief printing for the first time, and a version of my girl was one of my first linocuts, and still one of my favourites. I’ve tried her in various colours and with modifications to the block, which is one of the pleasures of printing. Yup, Neuroscience 4.

I let her lie for a long while after that, but recently she returned, in a very grand way. I’ve become obsessed with graphite pencil drawing over the last few weeks. After a variety of still lifes and copies of photos and paintings, I thought it was time to give my girl another outing. This time I thought I would exploit the potential of pencil for intricate detail to give her a complete figure and some sort of context. It all got a bit out of hand because you can keep modifying pencil if you use good paper. I added and subtracted all sorts of elements, including a large Indian bronze bowl, which eventually bit the dust.

Below is the finished image, with some of the development work below. I needed a new title, so I think she is now the Queen of the Nudists. She’s hanging over my drawing board.