Yesterday, I did a bit of drawing practise of a head thrown back with some severe foreshortening. It was so much fun that I did another today. My poor long-suffering family are posing for me. I have a lot of family. There may be a lot of these nose jobs…..
Putting The Work In…. So the past few days I’ve been slapping an underpainting onto a canvas but now the serious stuff has to start, I need to get stuck into the details. I want to have the head thrown back from the torso so I took a few photos of long-suffering Husb (I guess he must be my Muse) and drew this one into my Samsung Galaxy Note 8 tablet using a free Markers app. I blocked in the background in a beige-y colour and then worked up the drawing with white and a couple of brown shades, finishing with orange on the eyebrows. I used the stylus and my finger, the stylus gives a more defined line. Husb is very tall and I am short so I am used to seeing him from this angle. I love a nice bit of foreshortening.
Here’s how far I’ve gone with the underpainting ….
I’ll get the head painted on in more detail next ….
I’m not a painter. I draw, I make original prints, I experiment with mixed media work. But I rarely paint. So as far as I’m concerned, anything goes. If something doesn’t work out, I can paint over it and start again. So I don’t know what the rules are (well, some of the basic ones, but that’s it) and I’m going to do whatever takes my fancy. When I do printmaking, I prefer to work with just the three primary colours, Process Cyan, Magenta / Red and Yellow and I’m trying to keep to this principle with this painting; I’ll see how it pans out. I’m also keen on trying to draw more than paint, using very thin washes of translucent colour that flow from the brush with the sort of lines and marks I use in drawings.
Just Get On With It!
I find making art really hard. People often say to me, “how lovely to work at something you enjoy“. WRONG!!! It’s blood, sweat and tears all the way for me. I get stuck in cycles of creative self-doubt which are absolutely paralysing and I’ve been in one for some months now. So today I gave myself a good talking to and told myself to just get on with it. I started a painting a few days ago, putting on a dark ground and then a rough underpainting in pale grey, so today I mixed up a fairly thin wash of black acrylic ink (Liquitex Heavy Body) and did some quite quick and intuitive linework.
Although I have an original life drawing for reference, I am trying to work without it as much as possible, and rely on my imagination and intuition. I really must snap out of this and stop being so afraid to create. After all, if I don’t like what I do, I can always cover the canvas with gesso and start again.
Another Life Drawing (Female Nude)…
Here’s another life drawing I did at Swansea Print Workshop’s drawing group this week. It was a thirty minute pose that I drew on my Samsung Galaxy Note 8 tablet with a free Markers app.
I started with a mid-brown ground laid down with my finger and then worked the drawing up with a light brown large brush tool, again using my finger to draw. Finally I did some fine line work, using the stylus.
Back to life drawing (female nude).
I started back to life drawing group this week after a break of several months, life got in the way. I think the break did me some good, I’m a bit looser and I’m taking more chances and playing around with distorting the figure.
I drew onto my Samsung Galaxy Note 8 tablet with the stylus and my fingers, using a free drawing app called Markers. The slideshow shows the different stages in constructing the drawing.
I’ve been doing quite a bit of teaching lately and I encourage people to experiment, to loosen up, to enjoy playing with the materials and see what turns up. And I really should practise what I preach! So I’m trying to chill out and splash about with paint and not work directly from life as I normally do – although I am working from a life drawing, but very loosely. Let’s see how it turns out.
I don’t like working directly onto white so I put on a basic wash made from diluted blue, red and yellow Liquitex acrylic paint. Then I blocked in the figure with diluted white Liquitex.
Husb and I went to a talk by the veteran artist Hanlyn Davies at our local art gallery, The Glynn Vivian, this evening. I really appreciated it and learnt a lot. I’ve been trying to break away from always working directly from life, tapping into my imagination, but I’ve been finding it hard going. Watching Hanlyn run through a slide show of over 50 years work has given me a bit of confidence to let go a bit and keep experimenting. I added a bit of red paint to the canvas board I started painting last week, when I was using up leftover Liquitex acrylic paints at the end of a teaching session. There wasn’t much left this week. It’s going to be interesting to see how this develops, I’ll keep it intuitive.
One of my favourite places is Paviland, a strange otherworldly cove on the coast of the Gower Peninsula which is the site of the Goat’s Hole Cave, famous for the skeleton of the “Red Lady of Paviland“, which is actually a young man. From the main road, it’s a fair walk across fields via a marked footpath before the ground drops sharply and narrows into a steep rocky valley down to the beach. The slippery and difficult rocks look as if they have been melted and are splashed with colour from mosses and lichens and veins of different minerals coursing through them. I always take a sketchbook when I visit and I made this large monotype from one of my sketches.
I usually work from drawings done from life, only occasionally from a photograph and this is one of the rare original prints, a monotype, done entirely from a photo. I took the original image on a digital camera when I first visited Pakistan back in 2007, an amazing, life-changing journey. We travelled up the Khyber Pass, with an armed guard, and I saw this refugee family returning to Afghanistan. The security situation was much better then and I often wonder what happened to them, whether they were able to stay or whether they had to leave their home again. If you want to see how this monotype technique is done, click here…. I’m also running a short course in it at Swansea Print Workshop, please check on the right …..
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