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....