Life Drawing

Hello everyone.

Last night I was back at the Life Drawing Group, held in a nearby town. Despite having every intention of going with my soft pastels which I have not used in what's seems ages, as my lift was on it's way, I changed tack and decided to go along with the ink pens I had been using on holiday. As a back up though, my pastel gear was packed in my bag!

The opening quick starting poses I took on with the ink pens, simply to loosen up, but enjoyed it so much I just carried on working on every pose with them. Although the pastels were laid out to one side, they never got touched, except to put them back away!

One thing I must put my hand up and admit to, is that portraits as such are not my forte. In fact, I am not happy with the vast amount of faces I do. Loose figures are more my type of work, and the Life Drawing Group is helping me with this type of figure drawing in a big way. Below is one of the ink sketches I did last night.

Hopefully it shows that even though there are things you cannot tackle to your satisfaction, or just genuinely struggle with, you can still produce something that is starting to look reasonable and is maybe a base for a future work.

The very fast warm-up sketches help to get us to loosen up and focussed on the task in-hand. Admittedly they almost always turn out to be very poor indeed, but no matter - they are there for a purpose, and do their job.

This is one of the first sketches that I did after doing the warm-ups that I thought had some potential. Hopefully it gives a nice image with some interest for people looking at it, but - if you look closely you should notice from some of my previous postings that I have committed one of the faults that I tell you to try and avoid!

Yes, the model is not sat on anything - she is "floating in mid air" - not anchored to the "ground" or any base. Our model Suzanne was actually sat on a wooden cube with a large soft cushion on top. No excuses - I failed miserably!



Right then, enough for today, another posting tomorrow probably. This afternoon I am helping at the children's art group, then tonight it's a relaxing session at the adults group. Before I went away I had started an acrylic on one of those Egyptian eye symbols - sorry, I don't know what they are called - and so I want to try and finish, or at least make good progress on it.

So, until next time - whatever your art - enjoy it.

Paul