Recent Life Drawing
October 14, 2009 at 9:42 am | In life drawing | 2 CommentsI haven’t been posting much lately, but I have been drawing. When I can, I go to 2 different life drawing groups a week, although circumstances have prevented me from going to every one lately.
Here are a couple from the last few. I do feel that its getting slightly easier, but I often sit there wondering whatever made me think I could draw!
Sorry about the image quality – these are very large and so un-scannable, and my son has borrowed my camera, so they were shot with my phone.
Lost in the Wisteria, and some leftover sketches
July 13, 2009 at 1:54 pm | In life drawing, sketches, watercolor | 9 CommentsLast year we bought a slightly kitschy, copy of an 18-th century statue to put in our new garden. It stuck out something like the proverbial sore thumb, and we wondered if we’d done the right thing for a while. Finally, the wisteria has surrounded it, and it’s starting to look like it belongs here.
Some leftovers from my life drawing group, which has recessed for the summer:
One evening, the model didn’t show up. It was a beautiful evening, so we sat outside, drank wine and did portraits of one another. I was pretty intimidated, as there are some pretty amazing artists in the group, but I managed to do 3 – Marie, Monique and Phillippe, in that order.
And here’s a drawing of a dressed model, for a change. We were drawing outside on Saturday morning, and the wind picked up, so she put on her robe.
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Catching up with Life Drawing
July 7, 2009 at 1:00 pm | In life drawing | 10 Comments<a href=”http://www.bloglovin.com/blogg/828743/rue-manuel-bis?claim=bzzfcn8qusr”>Follow my blog with bloglovin</a>
I’ve just uploaded a slew of life drawings to my Flickr account, if you like that sort of thing.
What struck me, looking back through several months worth of work, is how different my drawings are from one week to the next. Some sessions I just can’t get it together, and sometimes I do alright – and the style tends to vary according to the model, the medium I happen to be using and my mood. Sometimes the first, 2 minute poses work best, sometimes it’s the longer, 7- to 10-minute poses.
Here are some samples :
Painting on a Bad Canvas and some figure drawings
May 7, 2009 at 9:02 am | In life drawing, oil painting, still life | 11 CommentsIn December, while I was contemplating starting to paint in oils, I recuperated a couple of canvases from a starving British artist I know, who’d decided to throw in the towel on his dream of living from his art in France, at least until he could make a little money teaching design back in London. Two things should have tipped me off that this was not a good idea: a) he was starving b) he left them behind.
Despite my inexperience, I could tell that these were just cheapo cotton canvas, but I thought I could work on them anyway. On top of that, I set up a ridiculously complicated still life, for my level of skill. So while I’m sort of proud of myself for getting it done at all, it really is a shame that the underlying texture shows through, and it makes it very difficult to fine-tune the detail.
Well, it’s finished – I’m not going to touch it anymore and I’ve learned a valuable lesson. And next time I paint – on decent linen canvas – it will be a pleaure.
Last night my life drawing group started up again, after a break for Easter vacation. I almost forgot to go, and rushed out at the last minute with an 11″by14″ sketchbook and a couple of pencils. I’m so glad I that I went, because it was one of our very best models, and she announced that it was her last time ever, as she’s found a real job in another part of France. These are smaller format than I’m used to, but I’m thinking of projecting them onto larger format watercolor paper and playing with watercolor, as I’ve done in the past . I need to release some frustration after each oil painting, it seems…
(That little black box is a heater – I couldn’t see through it, so I drew it in!
Do-Over
April 23, 2009 at 11:57 am | In life drawing | 7 CommentsNot happy with one of the nudes I posted yesterday, I washed off the pastel and re-worked it with gouache and walnut stain. Then I mixed up a lot of blue wash and poured it all over the background. Here’s the result :
I like it better this way.
Robyn asked about my projector set-up. I’m just using a Sanyo that my husband used to use a lot for PowerPoint presentations. He does a lot fewer these days, so rather than have it collect dust in his office, I’ve been playing with it to transfer some drawings done in my life group. It’s hard to catch this in a photo, but here’s the way it works. The clouds on the wall are a bit of a distraction, but you get the idea.
Here’s the projector itself :
Getting my Yayas Out
April 21, 2009 at 12:00 pm | In life drawing, pastels, portraits, watercolor | 21 CommentsI needed a little recreation after finishing the last oil painting, so I turned to media that I’ve worked with in the past and tried to work more loosely than I know how to in oils.
First I took photos of some sketches I’ve done over the past few months and projected them onto large sheets of watercolor paper (full imperial size, or 22 x 30 inches). Then I let loose with the watercolor. The first one came out about the way I’d planned, even though I spilled my water container all over it :
I wasn’t as pleased with the second, so I worked over it with pastel, but now I’m thinking of washing the pastel off:
And then I started trying to do a portrait of my son Damien, based on a photo I took in Borough Market last year when the two of us took a quick weekend trip to London. I took a shortcut by getting the main proportions up with a projector, but that didn’t get me through the painting process with no pain. This is very large for a portrait – and I kept losing the likeness from working too close to it. I’d think I was doing ok as long as I stayed close, but then I’d step back and it would be awful. This is getting closer to what I want, but the contrast is a little to strong. Still, I’m almost afraid to touch it at this point. Poor Damien was sick all last night, and I felt that I’d put a hex on him by painting him with such a pallor.
Now I’m ready to go back and attack another oil still life, I think.
Update – Damien walked by as I was posting this and said over my shoulder – “Not your greatest achievement, Mom!” I guess there’s still more to do on this one….
Catching Up
April 6, 2009 at 3:04 pm | In life drawing, oil painting, still life | 10 CommentsI’m still working on painting still life. I followed Jana’s advice and toned down the background on this one, but the camera still makes it brighter than it really is.
I’m also working on anther one – I’ve actually done a bit to it since taking this photo, and I think I’m almost there:
Life drawing hasn’t been going terribly well. There are times when things flow, and the rest of the time. I hope this means I’m about to make a breakthrough – that’s usually how I console myself when things aren’t working too well!
Here’s one from each of the last two sessions :
I wish I could find a shortcut to better drawing!
Finally, a quick sketch while out hiking. I’ve been doing much less sketch lately, and I must make myself start again. This was done with water soluble crayons. I didn’t spend much time on it, and I think it shows!
Recent Activity
March 25, 2009 at 9:34 am | In life drawing, oil painting, sketches, still life | 20 CommentsI haven’t only been doing quick ink and wash sketches lately. I’m still working on oil painting. I finally decided to work on a canvas, and I’m using M Graham paints, which are made with walnut oil, and so don’t have the awful (at least to me) and toxic smell of linseed oil. I’m not sure how close this is to finished – I think I’m at the point where the more I touch it the more I screw it up. I changed the background color yesterday by glazing over the original black background, which looked awful. Maybe it’s time to put it away and hope to improve on the next one.
Here’s the studio setup
And here’s a shot of the painting – it’s fuzzy and the light was wrong, but there you are
And of course, I still do life drawing twice a week. Last Wednesday, some of the guys brought in some large sheets of paper they’d recuperated at the art school. Since our model was a very tall dancer, I decided to try a larger format – here’s a photo of the drawings in my studio to show the scale.
A couple of closeups :
2 minutes (whew – that’s a lot of ground to cover in 2 minutes!)
and 10 minutes :
and, on Saturday morning , we had an incredible model who took one beautiful pose after another, but yours truly had run out of coffee that morning, so I wasn’t quite with it, at least for the first ones. A couple of them came together though :
2 – 5 minutes
and longer poses – up to ten minutes
As you can see, I was sitting in the back! That’s what I get for arriving late. Note to self – always remember to check the coffee supply on Friday evenings…..
Maurice Sachs and some recent life drawings
March 17, 2009 at 10:07 am | In life drawing, portraits, sketches | 9 CommentsA few weeks ago, I wrote about Violette Leduc, a French writer from the post war period who was close to Simone de Beauvoir. I became obsessed with her while reading La Bâtarde, and felt the need to draw her to get her off my mind. This led me to read Le Sabbat by Maurice Sachs, a charming but completely disreputable friend of hers. Violette was actually in love with Maurice, but he wasn’t attracted to women in general, and especially not to her. He did encourage her to write, though, and got her started in the black market during the war. He then went off to do even less respectable things, like inflitrating the Résistance for the Gestapo. He died near the end of the war – some say under mysterious circumstances, but really he was just one of the unlucky prisoners who were marched from one concentration camp to another (the Gestapo finally got tired of him too) and died of exhaustion. So why on earth would anyone want to read a book by such an awful person? Well, he was a big part of the French literary and artistic scene between the wars, and a he tells all. He was a lover of Jean Cocteau, good friends with an ex-lover of Proust, knew André Gide, Picasso and Soutine, and he was an absolutely shameless gossip. For someone like me, whose MA is in French lit, this stuff is irresistible. I am not particularly proud of that, but there it is.
So I drew him as well. It’s hard to find photos of Maurice – There’s an extremely famous portrait by Raoul Dufy, which you’ve certainly seen before, and which is one of the better portraits of anyone that I’ve ever seen.
Mine, on the other hand, are stiff and obviously from photos – one when he was very young, and another that must have been during the wartime years (in the full photo he’s holding what looks to be a wad of bank notes)
As an antidote to the stiffness of those two drawings – some recent life drawings. My favorites tend to be the shorter poses, although I really hate them while I’m doing them – I guess its frustration at what I’d like to do, but don’t have time for. these are 2 minute poses :
longer poses 5-7 minutes :
Drawing in the Dark
February 25, 2009 at 10:55 am | In life drawing | 11 CommentsAt our last life drawing group, the model suggested we draw by candlelight. This didn’t work out all that well as we could barely see him, so we added one light. Still, I was sort of grumpy the whole time because I could barely see what I was doing, and I felt it wasn’t going well. Coincidentally, I had had the idea of pre-painting my paper in gouache that afternoon and working in charcoal and white conte crayon, which was perfect for this type of exercise.
What a surprise when I looked at my drawings a couple of days later and they weren’t as bad as I had remembered them.
Anyway, it’s a good exercise for looking at shadows.
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