Tuesday life drawing

 
Shortish poses at this session.

Tuesday life drawing

Tuesday life drawing

Worked on an etching plate (soft ground) last week, this time graphite stick on newsprint, but for some reason, it didn't etch very well. Hmm. I have theories. Back to the drawing board.

A new year of life drawing

Had a day of life drawing on Saturday and our Tuesday evening sessions started up again this week so drawing for 2018 is off to a good start. A friend has decided to set me a weekly drawing challenge too so news of that coming soon.

Tuesday life drawing

Saturday life drawing

 We had our monthly life drawing day at the art gallery yesterday. No painting for me this time; spent the whole day drawing. The drawing I made from the long pose was pretty much complete which is very unusual for me - and the figure has a head! It was such a great pose - loads of foreshortening.

This may be one of the most successful life drawings I've made. Pity the cat lay on it when I got it home and carried off a lot of the charcoal on her coat! Ah well...

 

Here's the drawing before and after it had been 'improved' by the cat.

Tuesday life drawing

Drawings made on four A4 etching plates this week. Three of the plates have already been etched, one not, so we'll see what happens...

Tuesday life drawing

 Didn't have time to prep etching plates for this week's session so it was literally back to the drawing board. Drawing smaller this week, charcoal in an A2 sketch pad. Not too happy with these. Hopefully back to the etching plates next week.

Tuesday life drawing is back

 This term's life drawing started up this week. Made three A4 drawings on tissue over a soft ground so that should give me something to work with for a while. Three plates on the go at once! Four if you count my Small Faces. New way of working for me.

Definitely feeling rusty after the Christmas break but one of the good things about this way of working is that it doesn't matter if the drawings aren't any good - I can just remove the bits I don't want.

Palimpsest

Following on from my post on 7 December where I'd started to burnish back the image and etch over it again, I found that burnishing alone was too laborious and not effective enough, so I had at the plates with a scraper and then a drill with various grinding and polishing attachments. Much fun and some interesting effects.

I drew another figure over this image at life drawing on Saturday so watch this space for a scan when the print is dry.
 

December life drawing

Charcoal drawing - 3 x 5 minute poses

It was our monthly Saturday life drawing session at the art gallery at the weekend. This month I took along some etching plates to draw directly onto them to capture the full energy of the drawing on the plate. This gets lost when transferring a drawing from paper to plate as you stiffen up and lose a lot of the extraneous marks made when searching for the image. 

The images below show the drawing as made on tissue paper laid over a soft grounded plate (left). The images on the right are the tissue paper taken off the plate and scanned to see the drawing more clearly. 

The first pair of images were made on the plate shown in my previous post so when etched, there will be fragments of the previous drawing. The second pair are on a new plate which will gradually become layered with images; a palimpsest of figure studies.

March life drawing

 

It was our monthly life drawing day with Brian at the art gallery yesterday; there was all kinds of bad drawing and painting going on from me! Just couldn't get any proportions correct.

I had high hope for the painting as we had a two-hour pose but the fire alarm went off an hour into te pose and we lost half an hour to standing around outside in the cold. Not that I'm blaming my rubishness on that of course...! I was just having an off day.

Evening life drawing

When the Hamble life drawing class folded, I was really disappointed. I found a fairly local evening class to attend in the interim but unfortunatley it's on a Tuesday evening so clashes with Cowprint and the Harbour Lights opening of Imprint2. I've missed a few sessions therefore.

The course is run very differntly to the Hamble sessions and indeed most of the life drawing I've done in the past. It's much more focused on teaching basic drawing skills so the tutor has us do various exercises. I try to go with it but much prefer to just do my own thing. Yours, Wayward of Southampton.

Week 12

3 x 5 minute drawings

It was our last life drawing session of the term this week. I was hoping to sign up for next term but very sadly, the gallery is havng to move premises at very short notice so no more sessions until they find a new venue. Gutted. Going to have to have a swift rethink over the Christmas period as I don't want to lose the momentum I've built up over the last four months. And I've only just begun my painting adventure!

3 x 2 minute sketches

20 minutes

30 minute oil sketch