A Study of Concentration

The recent Life Drawing Workshops held at The Art Shed were well received by local artists keen to get an opportunity to expand on their methods of approaching figure drawing.

Classes commenced with a rapid succession of short model poses to be captured in essence by the artist. Workshop tutor Manuela Pilz introduced various techniques of mark-making, type of medium and its application, through to evoking more emotion by empathising with the model’s mood and posture to add to one’s artistic ‘tool-kit’ to help invigorate the drawing process.

Both workshops were highly intensive, with each artist getting a chance to try a variety of ways to approach Life Drawing with constructive feedback.

We sincerely wish to thank Manuela for conducting these highly enjoyable workshops.

Be sure to subscribe to the CAAS blog to receive updates on future workshops and events!

Step one: rise up and roll with it.  A Roller Derby skater in Oklahoma City, who knows a whole lot about resilience, poses for 3 minutes. 6B pencil on newsprint 17″ x 14″

Making art from destruction is a good exercise in catharsis. People do it everyday. The form it takes depends on the physical or emotional or even metaphorical destruction involved. Sometimes all three parts get whipped up together in a single twisting strand.

Looking up: Oklahoma City’s Poison Okies roller derby queen on the model stand. 3 minute pose, 17″ x 14″ 6B pencil on Newsprint.

Today is the third anniversary of our survival of a destructive EF4 tornado. There are a number of after-effects of that event, on any number of levels. One of them is that I don’t like revisiting it much. But when the National Weather Center announced its first Weather Art Biennale, I couldn’t not enter it. And there was only one thing I could paint.

Anatomy of a junk pile: “Rise”, painted from an image taken with my iphone on leaving the storm shelter, and the canvas itself was retrieved from the rubble. This was the guest room: old brass bed askew, unmade, the blue flannel sheet draped over the glass patio door, that ugly brown shag carpet mercifully stripped from the floor. The washer and dryer to the right- that’s what the rear of a Maytag looks like.  There’s a dead leaf, wallboard dust and fiberglass fluff salad sealed under a sheet of clear acrylic on the back of the canvas; the framer preserved it all for posterity.

I’m honored that my entry, “Rise”, is not only in the Biennale, but it’s the featured painting in Southwest Art Magazine’s show preview:

We wanted to see the weather depicted not just as a beautiful natural phenomenon, but also something that affects man’s experience of the world.—Alan Atkinson, curator, National Weather Center Biennale

It’s an odd but cathartic feeling to paint that appalling image on canvas (a canvas extracted from the rubble). The updraft of colored paper commemorates artworks gone with the storm, but also, in my own way, a rising sense of whimsy, and a little movement up, out, and onward.

Happy Friday.

Our first pose was 30 minutes. I decided to use line with form to sculpt the model just to loosen my hand and brain up before drawing. This acted as a small thumb nail for my actual 30 minute drawing. The pose was interesting due to the shapes you could see such as the triangle and gentle S shape within the figure. My eye is trained now to compare and observe the page making sure everything is in proportion. The straight lines are also helping me with face features, hands and feet. This is why I am going to keep with this process of drawing at the moment to train myself.

2nd pose was a lot harder, the shape of the back was slightly miss leading but I think I got there in the end once I had the rest of the proportions in place. The negative space was the key to this composition so checking each section with another helped.

Our final pose was an hour which is never enough I guess. It was okay for what I wanted to achieve however towards the end you see I have started to push line weight so the model wasn’t getting lost. I am really pleased with each drawing as I feel and see a defiant improvement in my drawing. It is starting to look correct, strong and technical.

I am really relishing the prospect of working in colour even though my subjects are quite monotone. I will need to seek out subtle nuances or invent colour based on tone. I want to explore different media. I could use:

• pastels hard/soft block and pencil
• watercolour pencils and washes
• oil pastels
• inktense blocks/pencils and washes
• acrylic paints
• coloured backgrounds, textured backgrounds
• artbars
• felt tips
• any combination

Initial experiments:

In my sketchbook, I tried out some of the media I had in mind. The cartridge paper wasn’t up to supporting some of the media, especially when I experimented mixing wet and dry marks. All the media had their merits apart from the artbars: I have not found any good modus operandi for these yet.

I continued my experiments on heavier cartridge and watercolour paper. I also looked at resists and ways of preparing backgrounds by washes, spattering and applying tissue paper. I found that small scale experiments didn’t always demonstrate the effectiveness of a medium, so I decided to do a number of larger works experimenting with several media.

My first attempt was using inktense pencils on Arches heavy NOT watercolour paper using masking fluid to reserve highlights. I hoped that the texture of the paper would be picked up by the pencils and give a sense of the gritty surface. This didn’t really work and I found the effect quite dead and flat. The masking fluid produced a crude effect even when applied with a bamboo pen.

I then tried spattering ink on a heavy cartridge and used tissue paper to create texture in places. I developed this with Inktense blocks and pencils. I used white soft pastel and acrylic ink to reclaim some of the highlights. I cropped the stone into a square format.

I think this was more successful in terms of the interest of the textures, tonal range and design, if not so accurately representational.

I wanted to explore a medium which I could work back into, scratch through and keep developing in order to show the sculptural shape of a stone, rather than its texture. I thought oil pastels would provide this. I lit the stone from one side with a daylight bulb which produced strong, blue shadows. I chose a limited palette of earth colours and a few cold blues, greens and purples for shadows and the traces of algae. I wanted to trace the contours of the stone in a similar way to my earlier pastel drawing.

I didn’t find the oil pastels as responsive as I had hoped. I reworked areas with solvent and then layered up again and scratched through, but I couldn’t achieve the effect in my mind’s eye. I would have liked  more subtle blue tones for the shadow, but my set is limited here.

I don’t think the oil pastel is as effective as soft pastel, so I thought I would turn back to soft pastels but try an approach which concentrated on the surface textures of another stone. I brushed gesso over cartridge paper with a bristle brush to produce a textures surface with some tooth. I then loosely painted an underpainting in watercolour concentrating on tone.

When I started working into the surface with hard pastels, I found they didn’t sit very well on this surface, and soft pastel filled it very quickly. I should have used a grittier gesso. The underpainting was very dominant. I felt as though I was getting nowhere with this approach but persevered. Eventually a textural representation appeared from the murk.

I like the way the brush strokes show through and the mixture of linear, speckled and scumbled marks. I don’t think I have accurately represented the tones on the different facets and angles of the stone, but I have captured the three dimensionality of the holes. I found it difficult to differentiate the glassy, smooth facets from the crystaline ones. Flints are so interesting.

I had enjoyed the abstract shapes produced by my continuous, unsighted line drawings and wanted to see if I could develop this idea with colour. I used a white oil pastel to draw unsighted onto w/c paper. I then developed the background with washes to try and represent the texture of the surface of the stone. I used ultramarine and burnt sienna because they are complimentary colours which produce a good neutral when they mix. I dropped and spattered them back into the wash, and also used sienna acrylic ink and salt. This was great fun but I think the result isn’t especially interesting. I think it would have been better with more earth colour and a softer blue or perhaps something like Paynes Grey instead.

I thought it would be interesting to try the same approach in positive rather than negative. A damped a support and draw into it with my finger dipped in the neat ink. I had to work very fast. I really like the abstract effect of this and how the paint has moved on the drying paper.

In my initial experiments in my sketchbook, I had enjoyed the results of felt tip pens on a  prepared background.

I thought it as very effective at capturing glassy facets, crisp edges and highlights. I tried to develop this on a larger scale but but I don’t think it worked. The delicacy of the medium was lost.

I have really enjoyed experimenting with coloured media, and perhaps got a bit carried away. I still have not achieved what I wanted or explored every idea, but I want to move on to exploring a close up view.

At some stage in their career, a Brisbane artist must come into contact with the infamous and inimitable David Paulson. Ryan and I signed up to his weekly life drawing class at the Brisbane Institute of Art (BIA, or as the man himself affectionately calls it, the Blind Institute of Art) in February. It’s been a challenging semester, and worth every effort.

Paulson openly divides his class in two: those who can draw and those who can’t. Those who can’t draw, he is uninterested in expending wasted energy on them: rather than teaching them to draw, he teaches them how to manipulate design, how to simplify, how to make interesting pictures. Those who can draw, he isn’t interested in improving their technical abilities: he wants to give them more tools, to give them obstacles to overcome, and to stretch them to be more confident and creative drawers. Paulson doesn’t send his students home with lovely resolved pictures—that is not the role of the classroom. He gives us eyes—he shows us what to look for, and where to find it, and how to coax it out.

In fact, Paulson’s main task with Ryan and I is that he’s concerned that we are being too academic. Our accuracy is costing us a liveliness, a life in our drawings; it’s interfering with the beautiful design inherent in the soft C-curve of an arm. We’re not taking liberties with the near-verticals in the figure before us, near-verticals begging to be recorded as strong actual verticals. We’re not telling enough lies–we’re letting the boring truth get in the way of a good story. Hiding behind extra details only distracts us from the powerful simplicity available to us, from which we can hang additional information later, if we must.

Week one, Paulson took great pleasure in teasing me to loosen up. Stop drawing outlines! You’ve never seen a trapezius! Look at that lumpen, hairy yeti! Edge-copiers beware, you’ll be sent to the Main Roads Department where your map-drawing skills might actually be useful. Hairdressers are likewise in the wrong class. The insults flow thick and fast; Paulson is not a man to praise a bad effort, and not shy of doling out colourful criticism. The end of day one, I came away thoroughly confused, unable to draw in Scott’s class later that evening. Scott trained extensively under Paulson, and consoled me thus: There’s nothing for it—it’s just hard, you’ve just got to keep at it, keep trying to synthesise  all the knowledge and keep looking for your voice. You’ve got to remember what it is you see and what makes you want  to draw, and to get so wrapped up in the looking that you forget about your drawing as a drawing.

Week two, my lines are facetious, and I’m drawing scones and jellyfish. Paulson implores us to look, teasing us about the beautiful model wasting her time standing in front of a bunch of people who won’t even look at her. I thought I was trying to make a more simplified drawing, but I came to realise that if my drawing was simplified, it was only to keep in line with what I was able to see. In fact, I am only capable of seeing so much, and I have to go easy on myself. Adding details makes for a more demanding visual investigation of our model; I can start more broadly and investigate the overall design elements first.

Paulson demonstrates this idea thus: ‘This is the most important lesson you’ll learn in your life,’ he says to a couple of us conspiratorially. He draws what appears to be an outline, a knobbly one, and proceeds to explain that lines have beginnings and ends and that you have to look for them. ‘Where does that go? What’s this? Wow!’ He traces muscular lumps through limbs and starts to really flesh out a person. I’m not seeing tone, though tone is a soft guide, and I’m not seeing volumes as such, though I’m hinting at them. I’m seeing the underlying structures. I’m seeing the building blocks of flesh. I’m starting to see, and I’m linearly describing things for which I have no words.

I’ve thus received an antidote to my lazy drawing: I’ve realised that I’m not lost in my subject and not concerned with what my lines mean. Adequate representations of models or buildings are uninteresting objects, but drawings ought to satisfy curiosity. Beyond being a simple visual note-taking, drawing is an exploration, a private searching, not driven by the preoccupation with making a nice end product. That comes of itself, when there is honesty in the act of drawing. I’m reminded of Nelson* (p. 78):

The reason for painting or drawing from life is to gain skill. For what purpose? For itself? To make the means into the end is uncritical and suspect. The skill acquired by painting or drawing from life is at risk of circularity or even fetishisation.

Where line has always held a special trance over me, and is perhaps more expressively interesting to me than the tonal and form-rendering powers of shading, Paulson also pushed us to work with an idea that spoke powerfully to me: the idea of using line, drawing, as a notation for painting. Some days he would push the idea of ‘shape recognition’—over and over, flattening the world before us into a series of interlocking shapes, triangles between bent arms and torsos, odd shapes between backs of legs and verticals of walls. When you paint, you lay down swathes of colour in such shapes, and you can notate this by line too.

Week by week, Paulson builds our confidence. His catchcry is, ‘Put your life on the line!’ He quietly implores me to trust myself and to have confidence in my marks. My drawings still lack the organised design of Paulson’s, but I am seeing the right things even if I can’t quite translate them onto the page. I see horizontals, but I still shakily bend them, and I see sweeps but I pock them unnecessarily with pointy bits. The lines on my paper begin to feel connected to me—where at first they didn’t seem to have any correlation to my brain or my hand, a frenzy of thoughtless marks appearing confusingly before me. I resolve to own those marks, and to mean them. I continue to wrestle with them.

My tuition with Paulson has come too quickly to a close. He is increasingly warm and giving as a teacher, the more you struggle and the harder you listen. My drawings are still rubbish and hopelessly uncertain, but I see better.

* Nelson, Robert. 2010. The visual language of painting: An aesthetic analysis of representational technique. Australian Scholarly Publishing: Melbourne.

Blind contour drawings

Classwork done in around an hour.

Scroll down to the August post to find the details for ‘A Day of Life Drawing’ at Margate Adult Education Centre on Saturday 11th May.

It’ll be fun.

..oh, and you get a glimpse of the ‘Life Room’ at Margate Adult Education Centre if you google ‘Roy Eastland’ into ‘youtube’ and look for the sketchbooks/life drawing (I’ve filmed a line of open sketchbooks along the big window there).

Our model was the statuesque Finn Laura, who also appeared, hair chaotically back-combed and in heavy alien make-up, in the cast of last Tuesday’s Draw sci-fi event (see previous post). My slightly late arrival meant I had a more side-on perch than normal and consequently more dramatic contrasts in light and shade, which I tried to do some justice to in the ten minutes available for each pose – tricky. I could happily have spent a lot longer on any one of these but then that’s often the case.

Click images to enlarge

Tried to get my images and gestures down faster last night. Big shapes. No measurement. Restate and correct after getting something on the page. No initial focus on facial likeness. Need to work at this.

Lost track of time in first 20 minute pose so no attention to face. Better in second 20 minute pose.

Final 90 minute long pose used charcoal on large Bristol Board. Have followed this pattern the past few open sessions. Enjoy using vine charcoal and moving the marks around. It is very tactile, almost a kind of sculpting. Left arm is kind if flat. Had to use the final 20 minutes to restate the head. It was too small. Of course, over compensated and made the restated head slightly too large with no time left to correct. Close.

Overall, not my best and not my worst.

Progress not perfection.

You can view previous figure drawings here.

Evie
(c) Trudi Murray 2013

Noah
(c) Trudi Murray 2013

Trudi (yes, really!)
(c) Trudi Murray 2013

Martha
(c) Trudi Murray 2013

And now for a nice cup of tea.

“attending life-drawing classes almost regularly is an immense help…!” =)

ONE OUT OF A few pages-worth of ‘mixed poses’ done in Speedball pen-and-ink.

though i was ‘in the zone’ every time i attend drawing classes for three hours, my hands were killing me at the time; rotating the board with one hand while painstakingly drawing in-between careful inkwell dips… it felt like i was doing ballet.

oh, the humanity…!

. . .

but hey, i ‘love’ it.

=)

Time spent: 1.5 Hours

I’ve been participating in two life drawing circles in Hamilton since we arrived a year ago. On Sundays you can draw from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. on the top floor of the Vasco Da Gama building on Hamilton’s James Street North, between Cannon and Mulberry streets. Look for the sandwich board on the street outside. It costs $10 and is run by artist John Martin. Anne Becker, the owner of 337 Sketch Gallery (located at 337 Ottawa Street near Barton Street in Hamilton,) opens up her own studio above the gallery for life drawing from 7 to 9:30 p.m. on Mondays. The fee is $12.50. Make sure to be a little early. The street door gets locked promptly. 

The first hour was really a challenge due to just using the medium. I found what I had learnt in the last few weeks of colour was to build up the colours, panels and composition. Working around the composition allows you to push certain colours back of forward. I found thinking in warm and cold colour also helpful as at times I would just want to tonally blend colour rather than comparing them together other.

Building up from light tones, to dark tones to then adding the final bright colours help. This is just my natural way of thinking but also clever due to the paint as sometimes it isn’t as forgiving.  I found myself split between two ways. This was drawing with the paint or applying it generously.  When Sarah and Emma talked about their work the were one or the other which made my work sit in-between their two styles. If I was to work in a thicker medium I would naturally want to apply thick layers and keep working on what was there instead of removing.

I am pleased with the over all drawing from this morning. Once I know I only have an hour left I always throw myself into what needs to be pushed or fixed to balance the drawing to a near finished stage. You can tell that their is light presence now in the scene however I was tempted throughout the whole morning to add finer detail with colour pencil! I defiantly doubt myself in what I can and cannot do. After these few colour lessons in life drawing I have learnt a great deal but it has actually been a refresh and a reminder that I can use colour fine. I think the class as a whole knows this also we are all saying we can’t use colour but it is ironic as we are all so strong and defiantly can.

Well, it’s only been a couple of weeks – but it feels like an age.

Need to get a new studio space, but first I’ll try the market.

A few months ago I worked at a school Christmas Market drawing the children. As I drew a crowd formed. Then a queue. Perhaps it was Christmas. Perhaps people were in a good mood. But for a few hours, the possibility of making a living out of drawing portraits seemed very credible.

Anyhow, here are some of the drawings. It’s time I drew some more.

5/6/13
I started attending a new weekly life drawing session. It was pretty awesome, and the model had a lot of interesting poses. This was the only long one though.

Time Spent 1.5 Hours

Straight line edge contour exercise

Carrying on with looking at line, my aim for tonight was to use line but with no curves and just straight lines. Thus meant to create a curve had to be several smaller straight lines to show the curvature of the body. This was a brilliant technique that I thoroughly enjoyed. Through out the evening I felt I was really learning and understanding the human form. It help me describe areas that I can’t normally describe such as the face and hands.

First few poses to start the class were 5/10mins. I have only included a few drawings below.

This longer pose took us to the break at 6. I thought this would be challenging due to the fore shortening and composition split across the page. However I got so focused on concentrating on drawing straight lines it allowed my mind to relax.  Slightly frustrating that I couldn’t finish the background as I try to work on filling my page each time if possible.

Our last drawing was on hour pose till 7. Again changing pose the model was positioned on a chair, something again i’m not comfortable with drawing. This required focus and to keep looking around the drawing to check and analyse proportions.

I am really getting into life drawing now as I feel I’m personally interested in what I want to learn, discover and hopefully develop. My aim was to look at line which I have been doing but I fear my time is running out as I was told there won’t be any evening classes anymore. I might have to start jumping into first years morning classes if there is space!

Look at me! I’m a Puppet!

My final college assignment of the year is FINISHED!!!!

Well, Hello There!

Does my ass look big in this?

Say ‘Cheese’!

Yes, tomorrow I hand in my final assignment which was to make a puppet under the brief title of “Another Side of Me”. This side of me is basically just a cartoon version of me which is the writer me as opposed to my more well known artist me. The final stage of this puppet will be to stick a pen to his hand, but i was just so damn excited that I had to photograph it and show it to y’all before it got dark!