The first 2 or 3 poses in a life drawing session are typically short, in our group we have 2 x 5 minutes and 1 x 10 minutes. When I was in Art College, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, we started with 30 -second poses and worked up to 2 minutes! That was serious discipline. These short poses give you a chance to isolate the important features in the subject, without getting distracted by details. I hadn’t worked with this model before and it was difficult getting his proportions right.
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I’m back at life drawing at Swansea Print Workshop after a long, long gap (see here) and I’m using these sessions to practice portrait drawing. I’ve set myself some goals and I’ll probably be doing this every Thursday evening for the next year or so. These are my sketches from week 3. This model is new to me and it takes me a while, and a fair few sketches, to get used to a face. He’s very young and I find youthful faces harder to draw, bags and wrinkles make things easier 😀
Looking back at my sketchbooks from November 2014, there were lots of scribbled heads.
It’s #Caturday Saturday again and here that little block I cut last week, printed in black with a touch of gold foil chine collé highlighting the moon. The foil is from sweets (candies); there are fewer manufacturers making them these days, I find them in upmarket retailers and traditional old-fashioned sweet shops.
I carved this Mari Lwyd vinyl block a couple of years ago and now and again I have a bit of a play with it. These three are printed with chine collé, which is a way of adding colour without cutting and printing lots of blocks. I’ve used lovely foils from sweets, there are still sweet manufacturers who use foils, but they’re getting fewer. I’m not keen on sweets myself, but Husb is happy to help out! 😀
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I’m back at life drawing after a long, long gap (see here) and I’m using these sessions to practice portrait drawing. I’ve set myself some goals and I’ll probably be doing this every Thursday evening for the next year or so. These are my sketches from week 2. The model is new to me and it takes me a while, and a fair few sketches, to get used to a face. By sketch 9 I think I had a reasonable likeness. Her hair was fascinating to draw, I had a great time with the mark-making, it’s such an important part of drawing, I think. I did some in graphite block and some in HB pencil.
I’ve seen this trick on social media, using cornflour to take a look at a carved lino block, to see if it’s ready or needs more cutting. This is the first time I’ve tried it and it works! Yeah! I can see one or two bits on the cat block where I might do a bit more cutting and I think I’ll do a bit more on the bucket that the tree is standing in. Then onto the printing!
I just used normal kitchen cornflour and it worked a treat.
I popped into Waterstones Café in Swansea today, having a quiet half hour, sitting quietly drinking tea and scribbling away. I used the continuous line technique with some cross-hatching using a ballpoint pen into an A6 sketchbook.
These are the first two scribbles I did in my sketchbook on Samhain / Halloween. I should have posted them first, I guess, not last. It takes a while to warm up so I usually do a couple of very quick ones at the start of a session.
I transferred my portrait drawing to a block of traditional grey lino this week, carved it and took the first proof print from it. I’m quite pleased with the resule. I’m being very strict with time and I did this process from the first pencil mark on paper, through 9 drawings, carving the block and a first proof in 4 hours. The longest bit was doing the drawings from life. I used Cranfield Caligo Safewash Relief ink in black onto Liber Charta 145gsm paper, printed with a Columbian Press at Swansea Print Workshop.
scribblah 