Life Drawing 9.1.18

Black felt tip pen, continuous line

A New Year and some new Life Drawing sessions! I was looking back over my pictures from last year and realised that we had the same model in January 2017 as we did this evening. This is no bad thing as I always enjoy drawing this evenings model and am generally quite pleased with how my work turns out. He's very confident and solid and somehow I find that translates into my drawings, I want to use strong bold lines and just go for it.

Felt tip pen, blind drawing

Felt tip pen, continuous line

Felt tip pen, continuous line

I did have a minor tragedy, I only had one of my favourite drawing pens (where on earth have they all gone? I had loads) and this ran out before the end of the session. However, I did have a lot of fun drawing with felt tips, I really like the way it glides across the page and the strong bold lines it creates. I'm not sure I'd like to draw all of my models with these pens but they were perfect for this evening and I felt like it got me out of a bit of a rut.

Blind drawing

Very fine fine liner

Blind drawing

I also went back to my sticking multiple sheets of paper together approach as I seem to be incapable of fitting a body on one piece of paper. I really enjoyed the expanding drawing and actually spent over twenty minutes on one drawing, which for me is a long time. I think for the first time ever I wanted slightly longer poses as I was really focused and intent on my drawings. Maybe that's what I'll do next session, which I suspect will please the other artists who say that five minutes is not long enough for a drawing!

Blind drawing

Blind drawing

Blind drawing

It was also good to see the other artists after the Christmas break. As usual I was tired from work and could quite happily have gone home and gone to sleep but seeing everyone and getting into my drawing really energised me and I felt very positive at the end of the session.

Felt tip pen, continuous line

Continuous line

Continuous line

Blind drawing

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Continuous line

Life Drawing 21.3.17

Continuous line drawing

Life Drawing always seems to come around very quickly but this time it really did as it was only three weeks since the last session. It was a busy evening, I had 12 artists so a bit of a squeeze but enough room for everyone and a good atmosphere. I asked our model to pose in the centre of the room so we had more space to draw and this also meant a variety of different angles for each pose.

Blind Drawing

Blind Drawing

Blind Drawing

Our model for the evening is a professional life model, he modelled for us quite a bit when I first started running the sessions but this was the first time he's been to our new(ish) venue. We had a range of excellent poses with lots of interest in them, such as twists and crossed limbs. Particularly with experienced models I rarely give much direction for poses as the model generally has much better ideas and certainly has a better idea of what they can hold for the allotted time.

Blind Drawing

Blind Drawing

Blind Drawing

I've had a really busy couple of weeks and haven't been doing as much drawing as I'd like so my focus for this evening was getting back into the 'drawing zone.' Almost all my drawing this evening were blind drawings, meaning that I didn't look at the page at all whilst drawing. I love this way of drawing as it forces you to really focus on what you're looking at and notice things that you may otherwise miss.

Multiple drawings on a page

Blind Drawing

Shading and notes

As regular readers know I like to try and change something or try something new each session I do so this time I was slowing down my line drawing. I generally draw very quickly, especially when doing blind drawings, but for this session I made a real effort to take more time and try and consider my lines more. I'm quite pleased with some of my slower drawings, especially my heads. This has been something I've been working to improve for a long time and although I still have a way to go I've definitely got better!

Continuous line drawings

Drawing over drawings

Continuous line drawings

Last time I did a more traditional pencil drawing with actual shading. I tried that again this evening but fairly quickly abandoned it as I realised that actually I don't really like shading, I like drawing with line and the challenge of creating form without using tone. It did, however, give me some ideas for teaching life drawing so next time I'm asked to teach a life drawing session I've got a few ideas up my sleeve...

Continuous line drawing

Life Drawing 28.2.17

Continuous line 

Another month flies by and it's time for Life Drawing again. I really did not have any drawing mojo for this session and this is really reflected in my drawing. Usually within quite a short space of time I find myself getting into the sessions and really enjoying my drawing but this was one of those rare times where it never really came together for me.  That's not to say it wasn't a good session, it was lovely to see everyone and have a chat and I enjoyed the discipline of sitting and drawing even if I didn't really enjoy the drawing as much as usual. We had some interesting poses and I enjoyed seeing everyone else's work at the end of it.

Continuous line

Continuous line

Continuous line, permanent marker

I think that as with all things when drawing sometimes you're just not in the right frame of mind and things just don't seem to work out as you want them to. I don't mind this, it's part of the process. I know that it won't last forever and one of the things that I really like about Life Drawing is that part of the point (for me) is that there's no pressure to produce a particular, finished outcome. Sometimes I'm pleased with almost all of my drawings, sometimes I'm not pleased with any of them and usually it's a mixture.

Continuous line

Blind Drawing

Angry pencil drawing!

In an effort to try and get into the session a bit more I did a lot of blind drawing and I also attempted something unusual for me, I used a pencil. "You've done a conventional drawing!" Not a comment I often get about my work at the Life Drawing sessions I run but on this occasion it was so, I had indeed produced a drawing using a pencil and there was shading. Admittedly the model looks a bit angry in the picture but I did rather enjoy adding a bit of structure to my drawing. As much as I love working with line sometimes it's good to try something a bit different.

Blind Drawing

Blind Drawing

Blind Drawing

This departure from the usual, or rather to the usual, reminded me that throughout my drawing career I've struggled to follow the rules but that this hasn't always been a bad thing.  At college when we were doing portraits in pairs I created my portrait of my partner almost entirely through smudging graphite with my finger. The tutor called it 'smudge and fudge' but did also say I'd made a pretty good job of it! At university I created a series of drawings on black paper using gel pens. One of those tutors (who it's fair to say I didn't really get on with) gave us all a lecture about not using gel pens but then cited my work as the one exception. I think it was one of my proudest moments on that course!

Blind Drawing

Blind Drawing

Blind Drawing

New Life Drawing Sessions

Life Drawing 10.2.15

Pen, continuous line

Sometimes I like to write my posts straight after the event I'm writing about, whilst everything is fresh in my mind. Sometimes, however, I need to sit and stew for a bit before I put finger to keyboard (that really doesn't have the same ring as pen to paper, does it?) Last week was fairly horrible for various reasons which, like most things, fade with time to become significantly less horrible. So, I am writing about last week's life drawing session in a more positive frame of mind, as I'm having a much better week this week.

Mixed sketches

Feet

Foreshortened leg

The session itself was, as usual, very enjoyable. I am lucky to have a roster of talented, reliable models who I know will always do a good job. Jude, our model for the evening, had some excellent poses and created some really interesting shapes. As I mentioned in my last life drawing post I'd been thinking about props and such like so I took a few bits along that Jude used to great effect.

Two coloured line drawing

Two coloured line drawing

Two coloured line drawing

Permanent marker

It's been good leaving it a while before writing about this session, even though I'd enjoyed the drawing and talking to the rest of the group when I came away at the end I wasn't at all happy with my drawings. I didn't think there was much good in there. However, looking back over the drawings to photograph them there are actually quite a few that I'm pleased with, including some from the longer pose that I had really struggled with.

30 seconds, blind

Red pen

Semi blind drawing

I did my usual mix of pen drawings; mostly fine ink pens and then a bit of permanent marker for a change. I experimented a little bit this week with using different pens for different parts of the drawing. For example, when Jude had the gloves on I used a different colour for the gloves and the body. I'm really pleased with how some of these have turned out because at the time it didn't feel like it was working very well.

Continuous line

I also did quite a bit of 'blind' drawing and some 'semi blind' drawing-where I give myself the freedom to not really worry about the results or whether it's a proper not looking at the page drawing but just try and capture the pose quickly and simply. I'm very pleased with the red line drawing (although it does look a bit like a murder scene) because I think the red makes it quite startling. For me it suggests there's a story behind the drawing.