Life Drawing, - General Practice on the Language of Drawing

A slightly longer series of 15 - 20 minute poses today to warm up the drawing muscles...

 Quick sketches using black marker pen on newsprint paper

 Slightly longer poses seemed to produce better results.


I'm still foreshortening the dimensions a little too much, I wonder if it's my height ratio to the model? - I'm 6'4", whereas the model is perhaps 5'3 / 5'4?

A very basic full - on drawing was made to test the theory that my sighting (being above the model) is causing too much foreshortening in the legs...

This drawing was conducted whilst seated on a drawing stool, lowering my eye level to that of the model. It appears to have corrected the proportion issues....











Some of the exercises in "Drawing Projects; An exploration of  the language of Drawing", (2011), Maslin, M. and Southern, J., London, Black Dog Publishing, were considered suitable themes to investigate in future drawing sessions.  I have purchased this excellent book for myself and will work through the exemplars through the coming months in my own time...
http://blackdogonline.com/art/drawing-projects.html

Life Drawing - General Practice

I spent a few hours on Sunday drawing a portrait of a girl that I had started and worked on some time ago.

Glad I picked it up again to finish the sketch of course, but this earlier practice seemed to put me in a negative area when I picked up a graphite stick today.

The start-up session today consisted of the usual four 2-3 minute poses, and I chose to use a charcoal stick for all this work.  The top first and second warm-up sketches were quite poor, lacking in critical structure and so proportionately they are just wrong.

The lower third and fourth attempts began to improve, though...

A more abstract set of dynamic poses were next, the figure on the far left seemed to be well created, but I didn't seem to have my eye in!

Not happy with this at all.  I seemed to loose the construction of the drawing and this flat and boney attempt was a disaster, in my opinion, my next effort was no better and I soon ran out of time!

Conclusions;

I wasn't too happy with the results of the longer poses as they seemed to have lost all the good progress I made at the weekend.  I wondered what I'm doing wrong? - Maybe thinking too much about the finished form perhaps and not creating the underlying scaffolding perhaps? I don't know, but I think I took a step backwards in my lesson today...

Life Drawing, Tonality & Form, using Conte Crayons and Chalk Pastels

The start-up session today consisted again of creating four quick 2 minute poses, to create various sketches using Conte' Crayon / Chalk pastels.

Having chosen three tonal variations of light, cool grey and dark brown, to provide the light, mid and dark shades, we proceeded with a number of poses lasting from 10 minutes to 30 minutes.  The principle exercise was arm's length drawing, but with a minimum of the line, and a maximum of 'form', to assist in the trident of Composition, Medium and Materiality.

Conclusions;

As I am also currently reading Nicholas Barriaud's Relational Aesthetics essays, Prof. Swindells, (our Life Drawing Tutor), suggested looking at the works of Clare Bishop, and her book,  Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (2012), (Paperback, published by Verso Books, London & New York;

Further research of Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-specific Art and Locational Identity (Jul 2002), MIT Press, Massachusetts. - A useful reference for later reading.

Precarious Constructions (Barriaud)?? Found Precarious Visualisations only.  (Further research required.)

[Later research found additional reference details; -
CLAIRE BISHOP is Associate Professor of the History of Art department at the CUNY Graduate Center, New York. She is the author of Installation Art: A Critical History and editor of Participation. In 2008, she co-curated the exhibition 'Double Agent' at the ICA. She is a regular contributor to Artforum, October, Tate Etc, IDEA, and other international art magazines (Source, Amazon.co.uk, retrieved 23/02/2016).

Miwon Kwon is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles.

General practice with charcoal and a new attempt to use Marker Pen

My usual warm-up session today of creating four or five quick sketches was a bit hit and miss... So we did a mixed "round-robin" approach, where each student made a 3-minute sketch of the model, then moved to the next left adjacent easel to sketch the next pose....

I found it interesting that the composition of the sketches changed so much with this method, nevertheless, it provided a good result!

Tonal combination sketching and paintings

By applying the three tone effects of dark, mid and light tones, a more painterly exercise this week provided much better results.

First, a quick 3-minute standing sketch of the model, with the intent to just provide shade and form, but WITHOUT lines...;

Then, using acrylic as a medium to define 3-tones sketches;



And finally, a more composed 30 minute painting of the model, again, exploring form through tone only...

Life Drawing, Expressive techniques using the "Extended Arm" with Oil Pastels...

 The Session today allowed a continued exercise of using an outstretched (locked elbow) technique to draw the model with a variety of Oil Pastels / and/or mixed media....

Extended Arm Techniques

In order to create a freer, more expressive touch, we undertook a number of drawing exercises that allowed us to practice with Oil Pastel.  The advantage (or difficulty), is that mark making is permanent....