Jon Nagl's Artblog

Life drawing 12/07/2015

Sunday was my last life drawing session until Autumn, and in the days beforehand I was delighted to see/hear the benefits of drawing the nude extolled on both radio and online. First up, this splendid half-hour Radio 4 broadcast from a Brighton-based life drawing session (yes, I know, not the most obvious subject for radio, but it worked well) presented by Will Gompertz. The tuition, and the reverence given to the model, is spot-on and a delight, and it's fascinating to hear from two life models (including one of Lucien Freud's - here she is) on what it's like on the other side of the easel. Well worth a listen.

A few days later, life drawing made an unexpected appearance in this BBC Magazine article on how to mitigate against memory loss. Three test groups were tasked with either walking exercises, crossword/Sudoku puzzles or life drawing classes. At the end of it, guess which group showed the biggest improvement? A pleasant surprise, partly because I'd never associated life drawing with self-improvement, partly because my memory is frankly pisspoor. Clearly more sessions is the only solution...

Learning how to draw was not only a fresh challenge to our group but, unlike the puzzlers, it also involved developing psychomotor skills. Capturing an image on paper is not just intellectually demanding. It involves learning how to make the muscles in your hand guide the pencil or paintbrush in the right directions.

Anyway, to last Sunday and my own attempts at venerating the model & developing psychomotor skills. With the fast poses I normally work on cheap newsprint paper (left over from a house move years ago) but for a summer treat I dug out some unused sheets of A1 cartridge paper.

The XL charcoal worked an absolute treat on this, the contrast between light & dark far more marked than using the newsprint.

Onto the 10/15 min poses, I switched to oil paints. I'm in the middle of reading James Gurney's Color And Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter (thus far it's a peach) and wanted to put some lessons on colour and limited palettes to the test. The results were middling to fair,  and I felt I was learning through my mistakes.

Similarly, an oil painting of the 45 min pose turned out flawed but with aspects I liked as well as stuff I can hopefully learn from. The colour of the body in light is a good one, but the shadow is too thin by comparison, although I think the actual colour works pretty well - it just needs a similar 'thickness' to the neighbouring colour.

Choons! I started off with Nerve Up, Lonelady's debut album which I bought after being so impressed with the recent Hinterland. It's cracking, wonderfully taut with a spiky guitar jabbing away furiously with the fast poses.

 

Followed by Jane Weaver's The Silver Globe, sold to me by a performance on Marc Riley's excellent All Shook Up online-only live music show - watch and be entranced.

And I wrapped up with the Buena Vista Social Club Presents... album, which doesn't seem to have anything to do with presents. Good music, mind, though I could've done without the attempts to throw turntables into the mix. Just keep it real.

 

Life drawing 14/06/2015

After sneaking last month's session in on the last day of May, June's took place just a couple of weeks later. It was a welcome respite from a lot of potentially-good-but-exhausting stuff that's on the go just now, although I worried beforehand I'd have trouble focusing on the drawing. It's certainly impacted on my daily sketching (or lack of it) but once we were in the studio and the poses started, everything else faded into the background.

As with a fortnight ago, I started off with charcoal on newsprint paper (well, it's actually packing paper left over from when we moved house in 2011) - the cheapness of the paper stops me from getting precious about whatever I draw on it, so I loosen up and let rip without the guilt of potentially wasting a pristine sheet of white cartridge paper.

The 2 minute poses went pretty well, and for once I didn't blow it with the 5 minutes either.

For the 10 mins I tried using black ink and wash on some thicker, albeit tatty round the edges, white paper. Varying results, although this one's okay.

Then 20 minutes with white and black Conté pastels on black sugar paper, overdoing the tone as per bloody usual...

And finishing up with a 45 minute pose drawn using soft pastels on some genuinely lovely pastel paper. I hope I did the paper justice, although I did find myself getting lost in the myriad of colours and subtle shades on human skin that you only notice when you really, really look. In retrospect, I should've taken a less-is-more approach and restricted myself to just a few key colours, rather than flail around in the doomed hope of realistically depicting the body. Oh well!

Musically, I started off with Faith No More's latest, Sol Invictus. Good stuff, although it didn't really provide the sonic adrenaline I like for fast poses (why didn't I play the new one from Joanne Gruesome? Why?!). That said, Black Friday and Superhero lit a fire under me, the latter coming on like the demented twin-in-the-attic of Public Service Broadcasting's Go.

Mid-section was covered with Braids' Deep In The Iris, which worked a treat...

Finally, Machinedrum's excellent Vapor City from last year. Months later, I still love tumbling into this stuff.

Life drawing 31/05/2015

That time again, and this month (well, last month) I decided to have a paint-free session. Working from a female model, I started off with that lovely condensed charcoal...

...before gradually moving to vine charcoal. As you can see, I'm still struggling to get the use of dark surrounding space around parts of the figure right, as the Mighty Yan does so blimmin' well.

Then some charcoal and chalk drawings on grey and black paper - I was pleased with the way the second one here turned out:

For the longest pose - 45 mins - I went with good old fashioned pencils on some lovely grey toned paper, using white Conté pastel for highlights. Nice!

As usual, all of the surviving work from the session is up on Flickr.

Soundtrack? Fast poses were driven along nicely by the second album from METZ - abrasive, narky, ace.

I kept the momentum going for the second hour with the recent four-track-but-long-with-it album from Follakzoid - really good instrumental Can/Neu-style rock, tracks in excess of 10 minutes that you can just dive into and lost yourself in. Get on that.

Last of all, the new album from Mew curled gorgeously around my brain, the perfect accompaniment to a gentle pencil drawing - I read Steve's review of a recent gig and damn near frothed at the mouth with envy.

Life drawing 19/04/15

It's that wonderful time of the month again, or at least it was last Sunday when I shimmied magnificently over to Wasps in Leith for three hours of figure drawing. In recent sessions I'd settled into a bit of a charcoal-for-fast oils-for-slow rut - leading to some nice results, sure, but I've learned it's best to keep your art on its toes. This month, for the fast poses, I eschewed the XL charcoal in favour of oil pastels. I've had them sitting around in my toolbox for well over a decade without being touched, damn near forgetting what the use of them is. What better way to remind myself than by bashing out A3-size sketches in under 120 seconds?

They worked nicely for the short poses, giving strong dark marks with more control than charcoal and laying down nice consistent tones. I tried using a rag dipped with turps-substitute to smudge the marks at points, with varying levels of success/coherence, and there was a definite sense of me scrabbling around to work out what did and didn't work best with this medium. I don't think I found the answer yesterday, but I'd like to keep trying at the next session - I think oil pastels have the potential for some good vivid, energetic drawings without the mess of charcoal or brush-filling-faff of inks. Whether I should keep trying with the smudging or just leave the marks well alone, I don't yet know.

With 5 minute poses I carried on with the oil pastels, switching to red. Went nicely with the thoroughly aggressive music barraging my ears at that point (see below).

For the 10 minute poses I shifted over to white Conte soft pastels and focused on the model's head. I'm trying to get better at capturing people's faces with as few marks as possible, so this was a good chance to try and catch some character in the drawings.

Long pose - well, 45 mins, hardly the 4 hour poses of yore (I'd need to return to Leith School of Art for them) - and after some umming & ahhing on the numerous materials I'd brought along I settled on a pot of Quink ink. And why not? Quink's got a nice semi-opaqueness to it, and in wash it's got a distinctively blue tinge which I quite like - not as absolute as Indian ink, even if it's just as permanent once on the paper. I worked large, A1, to avoid the mistakes of March's last piece, and I think it paid off. Not a personal best by any means, but it takes a few chances even if they don't all pay off.

Soundtrack? The fast poses were fuelled by the latest (and reportedly last, but who knows with those guys) release from Death Grips, Jenny Death. I've still got issues with some of their lyrics, but when they're on form - as they are with this album - then they're nigh-on unstoppable. The opening track is a particular highlight, I Break Mirrors With My Face In The United States, which sounds just as you'd hope.

 

Mid-way, it was over to Lonelady's superb new album, Hinterland. Quickly becoming one of my favourites this year, and this track damn near triggers a terminal case of dad-dancing every time I hear it.

 

For the long pose, it was over to 8:58, Paul Hartnoll's solo project. Inexplicably, I don't seem to have heard about this anywhere online except Emusic, yet features the Unthanks, Ed Harcourt, Robert Smith and Lisa Knapp, not to mention Cillian Murphy (yes, that Cillian Murphy, he of the blue eyes) giving it some spoken word over thonkingly wonky techno, the lyrics guaranteed to throw petrol on that urge in the heart of every commuter to go somewhere other than work. The video's suitably barmy in a Mr Benn style and features Mr Murphy gamely throwing shapes in the final minute. Punctuality.

 

Life drawing 08/03/15

Arrrgh! Another two month break between monthly life drawing sessions - this time, it was all the fault of a dreadful lurgee, afflicting myself and the wife the weekend I'd planned to go. Still, better late than never, I rumbled across the Forth on a ferociously windy Sunday, Haymarket-bound.

As usual, it was the 3 hour untutored session run by Jill at Look & Draw, ideally situated in a large open space in the basement of Wasps Dalry (a supremely confusing building once inside, like an Escheresque warren, as usual I wistfully daydreamed of an alternate universe where I have a studio there).

Kicking off with 2 minute poses, ignited by music (see below), I damn near threw myself at the easel, XL charcoal in hand. The joy of working large (A1 paper) and quickly is how physical it makes the act of drawing. Perhaps unconsciously aping the superbly energetic poses, I gripped the board, slashed at the paper with charcoal, legs taut. I'm sure this is reflected in these drawings, as I rushed to try and capture the figure in front of me.

The model was one of the best I've seen there, clearly aware of what a joy a good extreme pose can be to work from, especially when you're only holding it for 120 seconds (though even that must have felt like an eternity for some of those poses). As a result, I produced some of my best short-pose work in quite a while, another step or two on the long long path to discovering my inner Yan.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given the quality of these poses, the model is an artist herself (here she is) and runs the All The Young Nudes life drawing sessions at Cabaret Voltaire during the week. I've heard good things about these sessions (the Glasgow sessions were featured in this month's ImagineFX) and I'd love to go along despite probably being the oldest sod there, but Bagl's bathtime & bedtime still take priority for all my evenings. I even sometimes imagine that my years - nay, decades - of life drawing would make me a good model, at least in terms of poses... then I catch sight of myself in the mirror. Best not, eh?

The poses got a bit longer - 5 mins - so I switched to ink on A3 paper. Flawed, but I kinda like how they turned out. Worth exploring further next time?

10 minutes next, so I broke out the oil paints with varying levels of success. Each one of these could've done with a lot more time, but there's still things to like - particularly this last one, which has a certain energy to it even if the proportions fall apart if you study it long enough.

For the longest pose I stuck with the oil paints but worked on a small (less than A4) box canvas. In retrospect, a whopping mistake. I'd rather not post the result, but figure I should admit my errors as well as whoop my successes. The core problem was that I was working so damn small... and I still didn't use the entirety of the canvas, leaving space on the left and bottom. When will I learn that painting a full figure at such a small size with a certain level of detail always goes to pot? When? In striking contrast to those first drawings, I worked timidly, holding the canvas in one hand and barely moving. Never again!

As usual, all of the (non-binned) artwork from the session is up on my Flickr page.

Soundtrack? Those first poses were driven by excellent poses and Torche's exhilarating new album, Restarter. Worked a goddamn treat.

Next up, Viet Cong's debut, particularly the thunderous climax of Death, one of the tracks of 2015 already.

 

Last of all, for that last painting, one of the albums of last year, YOB's immense Clearing The Path To Ascend. If the artwork had managed to capture even a nanofraction of the power and energy present in the music, it would've been far better, though it might've left me with a shredded canvas.

 

Life drawing 11/01/15

December shimmied past without a hint of artistic nudity, so it wasn't until we were well into January that I managed to get over to Edinburgh for some life drawing. My god, to think there was a time I used to do this weekly! Now I can barely manage a month. Better than none at all, but it makes it hard to progress, to experiment, at any more than a glacial pace.

So, female model this time around, strong curves and good dynamic quick poses made for some satisfying charcoal sketches:

2 mins, charcoal

2 mins, charcoal

2 mins, charcoal

Getting there, if verrrrry slowly. Following the same pattern of the last few sessions (a rut? or reliable?) I broke out the oil paints for slightly longer poses and they worked quite nicely - I was particularly pleased with these two:

10 mins, oil paint

10 mins, oil paint

For a change, I kept the oil paints out for the longest pose of the day at the end - practically, it's a risky move since it means the painting will still be very wet while I'm travelling back home, but it's satisfying to use the oils for a larger and more sustained piece than the above A5 painted sketches. I stuck with the same colour scheme of naples yellow, ochre and burnt sienna, plus some white, and focused on the top half of the model to try and capture that sense of a voluptuous figure at rest. And while I think it could've done with another hour or two to do it justice (I'm particularly frustrated with how the shadows turned out) I think it's basically there.

35 mins, oil paint

I'm glad I stuck with the oils for the longer pose, even though there was some inevitable smudging on the way home, and might try and do the same again next time - especially if I can fashion some kind of device for carrying wet paintings without getting smudged. The fact I'm using canvas paper, rather than boards or box canvases, makes it that bit trickier, but here's a homemade option worth exploring. A large pizza delivery box might be the answer, but would that leave my work with a peculiar whiff of oregano? And would that be so bad?

(As usual, to see all of the work from the session I didn't destroy, pop over to Flickr and start from here).

Life drawing 30/11/14

*blows away dust*

*blows away more dust*

*uses jet turbine to shift final layer of dust*

Time to catch up on the last, er, four months. Quite what's caused such a hefty gap, well, that's to come in a future post, but for now here's the best of a life drawing from the arse end of November.

2 mins, charcoal

As with October, I took inspiration from Henry Yan's fast work with the short poses, working again with a thick stick of Derwent XL charcoal. Working with a muscular male figure, rather than a curvaceous female figure, forced a change of method.

2 mins, charcoal

2 mins, charcoal

And again, just like October, I broke out the oil paints for the slightly longer poses. This was the best of the three:

 

15 mins, oil paint

(You can snap that one up for £50, if you like.)

As to the grand 45 minute finale, a bit of a damp squib sadly - I went for a white and black Conté pastel on black sugar paper, but overkilled the tone. Should you be interested, it's over here. So, not a classic of a session by any stretch, mistakenly trying to make what worked the previous session fit again, although that 15 minute oil painting rather saved the day.

The soundtrack? Alas, it's been too long and I honestly couldn't say. December passed by without life drawing (this still keeps happening too often) so next post will have January's session. Onwards to 2015!

Life drawing 05/10/14

*blows away dust*

Blast! I never intended to let so many weeks pass by in bloggy silence, but these have been... interesting times of late, pulling me away from arty stuff and gradually sending my creative confidence into a nosedive. Still, I've been there before, and it can always be turned around by filling that empty page, screen or canvas.

That last post (from July? Gah!) covered my life drawing session for that month. I did subsequently go in August, but the results were no great shakes (the least-bad pieces are up on Flickr, if you're interested). September barged past, life drawing missed amongst all the noise, and it's only now we're into October that I've been able to a) get back to life drawing and b) produce something I feel is worth sharing. Progress! 

I've mentioned Henry Yan's Figure Drawing before on this blog, and really should write a proper review of the book sometime (in the meantime, feel free to buy it from Paddysbooks, it's worth every penny). It's a book devoted to drawing the figure (fancy that!) in charcoal, showing how the talented Mr Yan captures so much with deceptively little. I've struggled with putting his lessons into practice thus far, but this session marked a perceptible step forward in trying to find my inner Yan.

Key to making this happen was a stick of Derwent XL Charcoal. I was given this as part of a birthday present from my splendid in-laws earlier this year, but haven't been able to work out what to actually do with it. Inspired by Yan's book, I decided to give it a shot, mainly to try and block in the figure quickly, working on newsprint paper left over from the last time we moved house. It turned out to be a perfect match for 2 minute poses.

2 mins, charcoal

2 mins, charcoal

2 mins, charcoal

It didn't work quite so well as the poses moved to 5 minutes - predictably, my drawings ended up overkilling the tone.

5 mins, charcoal

Blah. When the poses moved on to 10 and 15 minutes, I switched medium completely to oil paints. I used just three or four tubes of paint (in retrospect, still one too many) and worked quite small. Although I don't think either of the pieces is particularly great in its own right, they both feel like steps in the right direction and I'd like to push that a bit further next time - here's the better of the two:

15 mins, oil paint

Coming to the longer pose, I ended up with two pieces - first, a small oil painting (A5 size) painted over 20 minutes, then a longer (40 minutes) vine charcoal piece, trying to learn lessons from those quick pose drawings from the start of the session. The smaller piece is easily the best of the two - while there's aspects of the long charcoal drawing I like (the tone on the leg is spot on) as a complete drawing it doesn't really work - proportions look a bit off, for one thing. The tone's too heavy, inconsistent, and the hands are pretty much ignored with a squiggle. Good mistakes to learn from, as long as I do learn.

20 mins, oil paint

40 mins, charcoal

The soundtrack? I started off with the brutal second half of The Bug's Angels and Devils - the three tracks featuring Flowdan absolutely lit a fire under me and helped contribute to the (relative) success of those early quick drawings. GET ON THIS!

 

With the longer poses, I went with tracks from Aphex Twin's recent Syro (quickly becoming my favourite of his albums, being pretty much unskippable). Cracking stuff, with nice long tracks to get lost into.

 

Life drawing 20/07/14

Last week's session was a bit of a wobbly one, working from a male model. Back on the black ink, I binned most of my short pose paintings for their ineptitude. A few survived the cull, such as these two:

5 mins, ink

5 mins, ink

Then a couple of slightly longer poses, so I had a go with the oil paints on some A5 canvas paper, with middling results...

15 mins, oil paint

 ...then a long pose where I focused on the model's head, what with him having a frankly splendid beard. The colours worked out quite nicely here, especially against the yellow background.

45 mins, oil paint

One of the more challenging sessions of late, which is just how it should be. That last piece certainly makes me want to try a few more dedicated portraits using colour oil paints - even though there's a whole raft of mistakes, there's a certain energy to it that pleases me. All of the (surviving) pieces are up on Flickr here.

Unfinished, unclothed, uncut

Three new pieces up for sale over yonder - firstly, a watercolour painting/ink drawing from a lunchtime last month. I've drawn the National Monument - or, er, Edinburgh's Disgrace - a couple of times before, but this was the first time I've done a decent watercolour & ink piece of the unfinished Parthenon.

The monument dominates the top of Calton Hill, just to the east of Princes Street. It was designed during 1823-6 by Charles Robert Cockerell and William Henry Playfair and is modelled upon the Parthenon in Athens. Construction started in 1826 and, due to the lack of funds, was left unfinished in 1829. This circumstance gave rise to various nicknames such as "Scotland's Disgrace", "Edinburgh's Disgrace", "the Pride and Poverty of Scotland" and "Edinburgh's Folly". - Wikipedia

The small size of the watercolour paper I worked on fitted a window mount perfectly, so it's looking rather natty, all ready to go into a frame.

National Monument, Edinburgh (May 2014) watercolour and ink on paper, mounted (£45)

Also, there's another piece from the first life drawing session this month - a complementary colours painting that inadvertantly has a hint of the Obama-ize photo filter about it.

Complementary 6 (June 2014) oils on canvas paper (£75)

Finally, here's a still life oil painting from last weekend, returning to the thrilling world of citrus fruits.

Lemon (Uncut) (June 2014), oils on canvas (£60)

So there you have it. Play us out, U2!