Given the view we currently have, it's ridiculous that I don't do more landscapes. Still, in the great tradition of not knowing what you've got until it's soon to be gone (well, perhaps) I knocked out not one but two relatively quick colour pieces yesterday evening, looking south across the Firth of Forth towards Edinburgh. Nothing similar tonight I'm afraid, Auld Reekie has vanished behind a curtain of rain.
Purple Forth in Pastels, 25 June 2015
Purple Forth in Oils, 25 June 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.
I'm horribly behind on posting about new work up at the Shop here, but there's three new pieces that have gone up in the last 24 hours and, shockingly, none of them contain the slightest hint of bare naked human skin. Instead, there's two watercolours painted during lunch breaks in central Edinburgh and an oil painting (based on this smaller piece) of the view across the Forth from Castle Von Naggle on one cloudy day. I really ought to do more of this sort of thing, shouldn't I?
City Dome Observatory - mounted watercolour - £45
This is part of the old Observatory on top of Calton Hill - you can read a wee bit about the history of it here and here. It's not as derelict as the windblown long grass in the painting might suggest, but who can resist a little drama?
Edinburgh Castle in Purple - mounted watercolour - £45
Edinburgh Castle. Nuff said, really. Would love to spend a day sketching it sometime.
Purple Rainclouds (April 2015) - oil painting on box canvas - £60
The view from Aberdour on a cloudy day, looking out across the Forth towards Edinburgh. A view I should be documenting a lot more in drawn and painted form than I have in the last few years. The summer months ought to see that change, especially these sunsets with great fluffy clouds of pink and gold dwarfing Edinburgh and the Lothians. Soon, soon.
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.
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:
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:
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.
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).
*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.
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.
And again, just like October, I broke out the oil paints for the slightly longer poses. This was the best of the three:
(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!
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:
Then a couple of slightly longer poses, so I had a go with the oil paints on some A5 canvas paper, with middling results...
...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.
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.
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.
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.
Finally, here's a still life oil painting from last weekend, returning to the thrilling world of citrus fruits.
So there you have it. Play us out, U2!
A rather so-so life drawing session today, with no pieces that leapt out as personal bests and more than my fair share of mediocre work. Even so, I still enjoyed myself, savouring the very process of drawing and painting even if the results were no great shakes.
With the short poses, I went back to charcoal in my ongoing yet inevitably doomed attempt to draw fast charcoal pieces as well as Henry Yan. Ha! Not a bit of it. Back to the ink next time (which seems to result in better short pose pieces) or keep on keeping on with the charcoal in the hope that eventially it clicks? Dunno.
Next up, a couple of 15 minute poses where I put a couple of apparently-fast-drying oil paints to use for the first time. One piece turned out pretty well, the other not so, but neither dried any faster than the water-mixable oils of previous sessions, so slightly regretting getting them. Ach well, they may yet prove themselves in underpaintings.
And, as with a few weeks back, finishing up with a long pose drawn using Conté pastels on pastel paper. Struggled a bit with the proportions here, and I'm not sure I won in the end, but it was a good challenge trying to do so.
You can see the other pieces from today that survived the end-of-session cull at my Flickr page. The soundtrack? BBC 6Music for the first hour or so, then back to Swans' remarkable To Be Kind again. It's pretty much the only opportunity I get in the month to listen to something so enormous, so powerful - it doesn't really lend itself to the commute, given one track alone is pretty much the length of Aberdour to Edinburgh. Still, something different next time. Sonically and artistically, I think today I got a little too stuck in my ways.
Two new pieces up ye olde artte shoppe. Firstly, a still life that was painted back in April but has taken bloomin' ages to dry off enough for varnishing. It's a #naptimeoilpainting (the hashtag I use whenever publishing a picture of one on Twitter) and has a nice curvaceous energy to it as I rushed to get it finished before The Boy returned from his brief sojourn to Nod.
Secondly, one of the oil paintings from life drawing earlier this month. A nice quick one, working with three colours and very little time.
