I bought a few meters of canvas, un-stretched to use with my new easel (a fantastic birthday present). I’m using all sorts of pastels and acrylic and ink but I’ll probably end up covering it in oil paint. I’ve only photographed part of it because it’s just a draft. In December I’m taking a break from this blog- an exercise in going analog for a while.
Red Hair
Here’s a charcoal sketch I did at Atelier class this evening – spotlight on a plaster cast of Anne’s brother. I may have to add some digital colour tomorrow. He looks a little ‘Douglas Bader’ in style I think. A 1940s English look.
a Douglas Bader style
I couldn’t resist adding brighter colours and pushing the exposure and making this image (from below) more vibrant. I’m in favour of pictures that give off an energy.
More Pop Dancing
At Atelier class this evening, we did speed sketching- 1 minute sketches on brown paper, sometimes using the ‘wrong’ hand. This was one of the longer 5 minute sketches, to which I added colour digitally after a good supper of grilled chicken back home. I love mixing classic charcoal with pop-art colours.
Dancing - 3
Here’s the entire charcoal sketch from this morning’s Life Drawing Club. I was going to cover his modesty in a fig leaf, but there’s really nothing modest about it. So instead I covered the entire figure with tiny coloured leaves and, well, here it is. A sort of Pan figure, with apple.
Male Nude
This is the topmost part of a full figure male nude that I sketched in charcoal this morning at Life Drawing Club. This blog is a record of my development in drawing/painting, starting from scratch. I’ve now been at it two years, almost to the day. I’m head over heels with it.
Face of a Full on Nude
Here’s David Yelland rehearsing Henry IV in the play of the same, for Bath Theatre Royal, earlier this year. Wonderful performance, amazing verse-speaking. I couldn’t get a good full-figure portrait of him in rehearsal, because he kept moving, so this is a close-up on a face battered with guilt and the weight of his crown.
"Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown"
I’ve just started my second term of Atelier school classes at Lavender Hill: learning to draw accurately with charcoal and paint in the European ‘chiaroscurro’ tradition. It’s very hard and absolutely exhilarating. Here is my exercise of drawing a plaster cast wrapped in a textile ‘shawl’ under a sharply angled spotlight.
My plaster cast sketch at Lavender Hill Studio
