I was looking online a couple of days ago and found that there are life drawing classes in the city every Wednesday evening.  They also hold day-long classes every six weeks on a Sunday.  They just happened to be holding the day-long session today, and luckily for me, they had a few spaces available so I booked myself in.

The session ran for six hours with single pose. It was a fair old challenge for me, since the maximum time I’ve spent on life drawing is two and a half hours. It was a decent enough sized room but the heat was blistering. With the dizziness I’ve been experiencing I wasn’t sure I was going to make it through, but somehow I did.  I did some warm up exercises since I’ve not drawn a live model in months.  They were woeful. I used a graphite stick, then changed to charcoal and chalk.  I’m not a huge fan of drawing with pencil, that’s why I changed to charcoal.  I won’t show my results as they are pretty woeful as I said.

I changed to paint after lunch break since I’m more comfortable with that, but today it wasn’t really my friend.  Obviously, I’m very rusty, and it shows.  I spent hours working on this painting and every time I got to the face it just wasn’t working for me.

I kept scrubbing over it with a fresh layer of paint, and so I couldn’t finish it in the allotted time.  It was very frustrating. I know I’m rusty, so I just have to be patient. I will return to the painting, but I’m not sure where I’m going to go with it.

It was good to get out of the house and back into a classroom environment. I’ve really missed it, and I’ve found it difficult to function artistically outside of it.  Weird, since I found it really difficult to work in a classroom at the start.  Funny how things are.

So I thought I’d show some of things I’ve been working on this past week or so.  First up is a painting I did in life drawing, which I quite like even if it is a bit hot (colour-wise). I am quite enjoying Expressionism painting and the freedom that it brings.

I did this with a palette knife and it is the first time I’ve worked on such a huge piece with one.  Theres a few bits that could do with some definition, and other elements such as the outline that could do with a bit less line. Otherwise, I’m fairly happy with it.

The next items are all taken from my Creative Textiles class.  I based these pieces on the theme Rendezvous, which seems to have gone in the direction of secrecy and covert operations.  This has led me to focus on the all-seeing eye and the building up of layers.

The first piece is a piece of silk that I have dipped in hot wax and crumpled into a ball. I then flattened it by hand and painted on fabric dye.  This is supposed to be like a weave pattern (although unsuccessful) but it has a great texture to it which you just can’t see here at all.

The next piece was a piece of devore fabric that I had batiked onto giving the shape of facial features.  I dyed with red and black again, as I felt this was quite murky and bloody.  I then used devore paste on the material to burn out some of the fabric, making it transparent in places to reveal the layer underneath.  For some reason though, I think of the top layer as being very Banksy – completely unintentional!

The next two pieces are on the same material – some kind of cotton I think.  I dipped these into the wax pot, crumpled them, then dyed.  What I love about these pieces are that they remind me of papyrus and ancient Egyptian texts.  Particularly the second piece.  As you can see, the all-seeing eye is present in both of these images, and are repeated several times in the second.  As you may or may not be aware, the all-seeing eye dates back to ancient Egypt and the Eye of Horus. Funnily enough, I didn’t intend for this effect on my first piece, but when I saw how it turned out, I definitely want to push it further in the Egyptian direction.

This part was more considered, and I used the batik spoony/poury thing (that’s my technical definition for it as I don’t know what it’s called).  I help up the cloth after it had been dipped in wax, crumpled and dyed, and then used the spoony/poury thing to drip wax down the fabric.  I then turned it sideways and repeated the dripping effect, to get a nice kind of hatching pattern, but a few of the drips ran askew, which was absolutely ok.  I wish you could see how rich these colours look, as I’m particularly pleased with these two.

So I cobbled some of my pieces together on a large sheet of paper and painted around them with fabric dye, dragging a fairly dry brush vertically in the direction of the fabric.  I love how murky this looks.

The next piece was done by etching into a piece of polystyrene, then painted over with fabric dye.  I then pressed it onto a piece of calico giving a nice screenprint.

The final piece was done using the same method except this time I used oil paint and pressed it onto 300lb watercolour paper.  I etched a smaller piece of polystyrene with a weave pattern and printed onto the paper in blocks, then I overlaid with my main print image.  I think this has turned out not too badly!

So that’s where I am just now, and as you can see, my time hasn’t been completely wasted!

I found it difficult to paint in a relaxing style, because, well, it’s not really me.  The aggressive style suited me far more, because it’s more expressive.  I also found the dark style to be too hypnotic so I don’t feel that the darkness comes across in my painting. Unfortunately, I forgot my first painting, so I can’t show it just now, but I’ve included the others.

This one is painted to Animal Collective, and is supposed to be aggressive. I personally love this one.  The style is completely different for me, and I absolutely loved painting it. I just got lost in the music.

This next one was done to ‘dark’ music – Massive Attack – but as you can see the painting isn’t very dark, and to be honest, it’s not a particularly good painting either. There are so many mistakes in it, but I know what corrections I need to make.

Which brings me back nicely to my painting for Contextual Studies.  As I said, this turned out completely differently from what I expected.  I was heavily influenced by my life drawing today, and sought to bring that into this painting. This is quite dark, but I was painting to different types of music, so there are many styles here.  I’m really pleased with this one also.  Since I am basing this on several paintings by Dali and Picasso, two of which feature the imageries of war, I feel that this expresses those sentiments fairly well. I am becoming much more comfortable with being expressive and trying different styles of painting – coming out of my comfort zone, I suppose.  As usual you can click on all of the paintings to enlarge.

Going back to the idea of music influencing painting style: do you listen to music when you’re painting? If so, what kind of music do you listen to, and what does it do for your style? Perhaps you don’t listen to music. Perhaps you can try, to see how it affects your style. I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

So, we did some warm up exercises and then we  did a 20 minute pose, followed by a 45 minute pose.  The results are below.  There are many things that need fixed in the paintings, but I like where they are going.

Creating this has given me the chance to be a bit bolder.  I’m trying to learn not to be so ‘precious’ about what I’m creating, in the sense that if I don’t like how it’s going then I’ll paint over the top of it.  This has been something that I’ve been scared to do.  I’ve kind of felt that since I’ve just spent hours creating it, I have to live with it.  Silly, I know.  However, I’ve painted over this several times and you really can’t see much of the original colouring.  I’ve used all sorts of colour here like reds and pinks, alongside blues and yellows.  Combinations I never thought I’d use.  So, yeah, I’m really enjoying this.

I’m back to college tomorrow and I have been working on my life drawing skills for my assessment, also tomorrow.  The feet I did in the classroom with a live model, but he wasn’t there the last class before the holidays, so we had to work on the hands at home.  I’ve drawn my own hands.  It’s really difficult to try and hold a pose when you’re trying to draw it at the same time.  Your hand or whatever your drawing tends to move. Obviously that’s something you have to get used to, and you have to adapt.  The drawings aren’t great but since I’m just learning I’m not too down about it.  Thankfully my tutor is really interested in expression at this stage, and not overly concerned about exact detail.

So, I’m actually getting on really well with my final pieces. I’m just about done with the top painting, so that’s My Space out of the way.  I have a drypoint etching to do tomorrow for Coast, which I would do today but I have to paint the surface first and run it through the printing press before I can do the etching. I also have my collograph to print and I have my lino cut ready to go. So basically all I have to do is my printouts, and that project is finished.  I just have to do my paintings for Painting To A Theme, but I will have 2 weeks to complete these, and since I’ll be finished everything else I’ll have the whole 2 weeks to do these.  That will be plenty of time!  I can’t believe I’m so far ahead with everything, especially given the state of panic at the start of the course.  I’m really, really pleased with how I’ve coped, and I feel I’ve come on massively since the start.  I really can’t wait to see where I’ll be in a year’s time!

Tomorrow’s assessment will focus on how we have interpreted the facial features of the sitter.  We will also start working on the structure of the hands and feet, building towards the next assessment in week 8.  I am fairly content with what I’ve done for the first assessment, which was to include two of each facial feature: the ear, eye, nose and mouth. 

I worked with various mediums for this: oil pastels, biro, soft pastels (a first time for me), acrylic paint and graphite stick.  We were to get down each item as quickly as we could, with the model sitting for 20 minutes at a time, and we were to move around the model rather than staying in one position for any length of time.  I tidied up the rough sketches today, for presentation tomorrow.  I’m think I’ve done enough to pass the assessment, or at least, I hope!  So, here it is in all it’s glory on an A2 sheet of paper.

I couldn’t wait to start Life Drawing, but it is proving much more difficult than I’d expected.  I know it was going to be more difficult, no doubt, but not as difficult as I’m finding it.  I find the lighting rather hard to cope with, and I need to go for an eye test for new glasses and contact lenses.  I definitely think I need to wear my glasses for this classes rather than my lenses.  The vision with lenses is never as good as with glasses.

Because we are sitting at a certain distance from the model it makes it harder to see all the subtle nuances of the face/body.  Although I’m inclined to think that the eyes are trying too hard to see things that we know are there but aren’t able to discern from a distance.  I know that I should just draw what I see, rather than what I think should be there, but it is difficult to break this habit.  I am trying though.

The part I found most difficult to draw was the mouth.  The gentleman’s mouth we are drawing is very small, the lips are very thin, and I find it too difficult to see the subtleties in shade.  My tutor said that sometimes you have to force what you don’t see onto the image, which kind of contradicts his other statement of just drawing what you see.  So, my question would be: At what point should you force something or just draw what you see?

Matt has told me that it will get easier with time.  I’m sure he’s right but it feels like a struggle just now.  Here are the images I’ve done so far: