Life Drawing: Slightly Built

Our model at life drawing session last week is very slight and I sometimes find it difficult with slightly built people to get their proportions right. I’m quite buxom myself, so it’s a challenge to draw someone much thinner, I keep expecting to see fat where there isn’t any. The drawing is in black, sanguine and white conté crayon, onto a sheet of re-used paper prepared with a couple of layers of green acrylic silkscreen inks.

Life Drawing: A Portrait Sketch

Went to the life drawing session at Swansea Print Workshop earlier in the week and I think for the first time ever, there was no need to switch on a heater because of the insane heatwave. In fact, our model had an electric fan to keep cool. I did a portrait sketch with black and white conté crayon, onto a sheet of re-used paper prepared with a couple of layers of green acrylic silkscreen inks. It’s a nice surface to draw onto and I like to get rid of the white paper, I find it intimidating.

More Stopover Sketching…

Here’s another scribble I did during my hour and a half stopover in Manchester Piccadilly train station on the way back from visiting in the Lake District the other week. This chap was totally engrossed in his phone. I was drawing from a mezzanine about the main station concourse.

Stopover Sketching

I was visiting in the Lake District the other week and travelled by train. I had an hour and a half stopover in Manchester on the way back so I had a picnic and a scribble in my sketchbook. The lad on the right had an interesting hairdo; like a pudding basin cut with flick-ups all round.

Sketchbook Archives: 64

Ten years ago it was hot beach weather. Not as punishingly hot as it’s been for the past few days, but still hot hot hot!

Stayed In Sniffling…

Here’s another sketch I did en plein air last Spring in the Lake District. I was hoping to have done more last week when I visited, but it seems I might have developed geriatric hay fever and I ended up mostly staying indoors, sniffling. Ah well, I’ll stay by the sea in summer in future.

Been Away…

I visited the Lake district last week but unfortunately went down with something not long after I got there. I’m not sure if it was a lurgi, or whether I had hay fever for the first time. I didn’t have a temperature which makes me think it wasn’t a virus, and the farmers had been cutting grass over the weekend, so the hay fever theory might be right. Whatever, I didn’t feel well enough to go tramping the commons and fells with my Khadi landscape sketchbook, so here’s one I did when I visited in Spring last year.

Life Drawing: Instinct

This was the final life drawing I did last week at Swansea Print Workshop’s weekly sessions, and although I quite like the drawing, I’m still struggling to get a good likeness of the model. Comparing my drawings with another artist later, I realised that our model has huge eyes, so large that I instinctively and without realising it, scaled them down. When I was in Art School many years ago, we were always told to draw what we see, not what we think we see! I’ve got no excuse.

Life Drawing: Self Censoring

When I first took up social media, way back in the early days with MySpace, things seemed much more relaxed and artists were mostly able to post authentic artwork of nudes without much hassle. Not any more, not for some years now. So I’ve cropped this, which is a shame because I think it’s one of the best drawings I’ve done in ages. But there we are.

I used conté crayons in white, sanguine and black onto recycled Somerset printmaking paper, squeegeed with a couple of layers of different green acrylic screenprint inks. The drawing took 20 minutes.

Life Drawing: 15 Minute Heads

I was working with a new model at last week’s life drawing session at Swansea Print Workshop, and it takes a while to get used to someone’s features. These are 15-minute sketches, I was able to take a bit of time to get some measurements done. I used conté crayons in white, sanguine and black onto recycled Somerset printmaking paper, squeegeed with a couple of layers of different green acrylic screenprint inks.