Life drawing

Two sessions of life drawing as part of the course at Mary Ward have been scary, exhilarating, confusing, frustrating and rewarding in equal measure. We drew two different models, both beautiful young women, in a series of 3 minute and 5 minute poses, clothed and naked, with and without props. All A1 size with charcoal.

The clothed figure was the most difficult to capture

This one could be rendered in stitch at some point.

Lots of work needed to capture faces, hands and feet, but at least they don’t look like aliens.

Drawing and domesticity

The art tutor took us to see a free exhibition of work, mostly drawings, by Maggi Hambling at the British Museum, called ‘Touch’. Maggi Hambling divides opinion, but I like a lot of her work particularly the Scallop sculpture. The exhibition is on until 29 January 2017.
Photography is allowed.  The intent of the visit was for us to study Hambling’s mark making and to study, through copying, those marks. As some of the work was mono printing, that was difficult to do, however just looking at the range of marks on the print of this figure was inspiring.

There are some very touching drawings of her friends and family close to death.

My own attempt at that figure, head and hand. Nowhere near, but closer than I was 2 years ago.

The next week, a replacement tutor catapulted us in to portraiture -aaarrrggghhh!. After I calmed myself down, I’m pleased with this ( A2 size, charcoal and chalk on a coloured paper), as it is recognisable as the sitter, though he said I had made him look much younger.

Stitching for the past few weeks has been very domestic.
Replacement curtains and cushions for the bedroom to replace the “temporary” curtains and cushions that had been put in 22 years ago. After 21 years of family life, including the dog choosing one of the cushions as his favoured favoured window-viewing spot, they finally had to go.
The pattern matching along the front of the past of cushions took much measuring and swearing to get correct.



Inherited Ercol chairs have arrive in our house ( let’s say that ours have more of the patina of age about them). Their cushions were also in a sorry state, so while my piping skills were honed by the 30 degree corners on the bedroom cushions, I could tackle four replacements for these. Not in the original style, but a lot more comfortable.

The swan has also been finished. Faced rather than bound and waiting for the right wall space to show it to advantage.

Scarf, silk, stitch

Several months ago, I dyed some silk that had been a gift from Lorraine Pugh. Supposedly offcuts - these were superb lengths.  I never posted the results of the dyeing, so here they are, as I have finally got round to using them

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I have a much loved wool / cashmere shawl, but it is grey. Trying to introduce a bit more colour, at the same time as simplifying my wardrobe, is proving a challenge, so the grey had to be brightened up.

Quilting some of the silk on the wool

Next stage is to stitch some rouleaux loops and fabric buttons to make it a more individual version of one of these. Inspired a bit by the beautiful scarves made by Ekta Kaul, that I saw in Edinburgh, earlier in the year.

 

Serpentine curves

Great photo opportunities at the Serpentine summer houses today

Shell drawing

Three weeks in to the new term of the drawing course, and we have had the challenge to choose an object, divide our paper in to 4 sections ( whichever way we wished, but with straight lines only) and then draw our object using only line in one part, only tone in another, texture in the next and form in the last section.  We could use any medium we wished, wet or dry, but the drawing had to be very large, on at least A1 size paper.

I chose a shell, blurry photo below

and the result is

Furthermost left was line, the top section was tone, the middle was texture and the lower right part was form.  I got totally confused with form until I eventually realised that this had to be a combination of line and tone.  i used 4 grades of pencil, and about 5 different sticks of charcoal, both willow and compressed.

I can see now how my brain deceived my eye in drawing the inner curves of the shell  - drawn curving to the right at the topped, when they are clearly curving to the left. I need to write out the tutor’s mantras and recite them to myself at the beginning of each class:

- draw what you see, not what you know

- the light is your friend

- note down the light direction

- your object is sitting on something - what is it?

- a rubber is as important as a pencil or charcoal

Off to sharpen my pencils!