aquacatt

A while ago I was looking for some late night top-ten-tips for life drawing. I found a site on the internet, and now I can’t remember what it was. Shame.

Oh well, the one thing I did remember from that site was about angles, and how when you transfer from real life to the page everything will appear exaggerated. Wow! YOu know, that never clicked in my mind until that moment.

Sure we did ‘perspective’ in technical drawing at school, but for things like life drawing I would never have thought it applied there too. Well, that was me enlightened for sure.

So of course I had to go and give it a try, but at 10:30pm where am I going to find someone to draw? Ha, oh yeah, there’s always me isn’t there!

Feet are very far away from hands generally, so naturally I’d be able to use the exaggerated angles rule on them. Here’s the results…

Drawing what you see… sometimes the angles look all wrong but they are not

The other left foot…

It was quite a challenging exercise. My vanity kept saying “I’m sure my feet don’t really look like that!”. But, how often do I really ‘look’ at my feet? In fact, how often do a really look at anything. Must look more closely in future.

So, since going along to the classes before xmas new drop-in session have started up inRoslin village every Monday. This is really good for me because it means I can get to a class on my lunch break from work. How handy.

Here’s a few of the bits I’ve done at the classes recently (I only have an hour, so it’s all quite rushed…)

Trying to get my angles right

It’s not a Da Vinci but I wanted to use red chalk and see what it does…

Charcoal – am quite pleased with this sketch

Pencil sketch – practising proportion and some shading/hatching details

I have to say I’m really enjoying this but an hour only allows me to do so much. Getting two sketches down is not bad going when everyone else is using other exciting media like paints and inks (but they have 2-3 hours for those). I’m going to have to prepare some backgrounds in advance for future classes to give me something other than a white background to play with.

Ali Ferguson is a textile artist based in Roslin, Midlothian. She runs The Purple Thread Shed, which is exactly what it says and is Ali’s workshop and creative space in her back garden. I found out about Ali through the Edinburgh Embroiderers Guild, and was delighted to be able to get places on a selection of her Experiment to Stitch 1-day workshops for 2013.

The first one was an introduction to working… mind maps, sketchbooks, themebooks and the like.

This was an incredible opportunity to be in a environment ripe for chat and exchange of textile-based ideas. I was fortunate enough to meet another OCA student, and it showed me I wasn’t alone in Scotland doing the OCA textile courses.

The main things I took from the workshop today were new inspiration on sketchbooks, ideas on how to make and actually use mind-maps as a tool for a project and new ways to use papers and interfacing to make a mixed paper background full of interest and texture.

Theme book mind map – so useful

Although I made a mind-map sketch at the session I decided to make a new one once I got home, that’s it above. At the session I noticed that although I wasn’t happy with what I’d ended up with it showed me that you don’t necessarily have to follow a trail from beginning to end and act upon every word you put down.

So looking back on my second mindmap I picked out the words which were quite common or repeated and words which were specifically interesting to me. I’ll work from these for my Project 7 Theme Book ideas.  In the photo above these are circled in reds and oranges. I’ll probably compile these into another separate mindmap and work on them a bit more in my theme book.

In the afternoon section of the day we worked with papers to create an interesting background that could be used for further textile work. Using almond oil and different types of paper we scrunched and crushed the sheets or pages until we were happy. Then we ironed them gently and arranged them onto a sheet of self-adhesive/heat-fixable interfacing. A bit more ironing and they were tacked onto the interfacing and ready for any further work (might use it in the next workshop…). It’s really impressive what you can create in a short space of time, and it gives such an interesting starting point for a piece of work. No blank white paper or fabric starring at you!

Layering up hand textured paper to form a background for a themed textile piece

This background has used old maps, pages of novels, sheet music and parcel paper. So, I’ll be trying this some more… only not with maps I want to use in the future 🙂

Half way through our classes after tonights session, so got to make the most of every second. That’s how much I’m loving this!

We did some loosening-up warm-up sketches of the model to start with. I tried a few different things, and was using willow charcoal for a change. It’s very soft compared to the compressed charcoal pencil I’d previously been using. I tried some new things, and looked at the paper more. I found that hard, looking at the paper too much. It meant I stopped and started a lot, lost time thinking and worried about things too much. Here’s one of the efforts…

Warmup sketch 1 minute – compressed charcoal pencil

Then we moved onto the longer poses. Aine introduced us to the work of Seurat, post-impressionist and creator or pointillism. He made some very fine tonal studies and we were going to have a go at using this for our first sketch. Aine demonstrated for us firstly. By using willow charcoal she covered the entire paper in black. Then using an eraser she began to sketch the model, not by adding colour or tone but by removing it from the black charcoal already laid down. This was incredibly exciting.

So, we gave it a go, creating lots of charcoal dust in the process!

Here we were creating the lighter areas of the model by removing more or less of the black, and in some ways that is easier than adding colour to the paper. You can easily put more charcoal on if you rubbed away too much. Sometimes it’s hard to cover up too much oil pastel or neat ink.

Here’s the result…

Charcoal sketch

I’m pleased with this. After Aine’s feedback I added in background verticals of window frames or curtains and this really helped. I almost forgot to look at the background areas of tone, and without them the figure looked a lot flatter.

For the second long pose we got to choose what we used as a medium from the previous weeks, paper or gouache as a base. I tried the paper again, for practice with collage. I’m not too displeased with it.

Collage portrait

I need to practice my perspective more, and find ways that work for me that don’t involve drawing outlines. I dislike the effects of using outlines, I think what I draw comes out looking very flat and 2D whenever I use just outlines. It is after all the tones that give it a 3D quality. So, more tonal practise and less drawing an outline and filling it in I think.

Oh, and I also re-homed a second hand book after Aine’s recommendation: ‘Drawing, seeing and observing – Ian Simpson’. It’s not a new version, but I’m hoping the lessons should be the same… some educational bed-time reading coming up!

So, second class… and I was thinking ‘i’m not going to get the hang of this this week, it was definitely beginners luck last week!’…

Well, the loosening-up exercises were a bit mixed, but it kinda went okay…

Warm up sketch – 1 minute

Then we moved onto the longer poses. And this week we were using collage.

When I did collage at school it meant making a picture out of anything you could cover in PVA and stick to sugar paper! Cotton balls, pasta and spaghetti, dry grasses, bits of fabric and paper, small rocks, feathers, shells, buttons, lids, plastic, twigs… most of the time it looked like something you find in the bottom of a supermarket carpark hedge…

So, collage in painting… well, that’s different. I’d seen a glimpse of what sort of effect you could achieve after seeing some of Duncan Grant’s work at the Picasso exhibition recently. The effects are subtle, you can tell there’s something going on with the paintings surface but you have to look closely to see what it is. Thats quite an exciting effect I feel.

The collage we were attempting in this class was to substitute the flesh tone gouache we’d used the previous week for a sandy coloured or flesh-tone paper. Instead of applying with a brush you tore the shape you wanted roughly from the paper. The tearing process was interesting itself. Looking at the model and then tear the paper as if you were roughly drawing the outline of the skin areas you could see… quite hard really.

Once torn, apply glue and stick to your main sheet of paper… then proceed as before. Ink washes, charcoal, oil pastels and fine lines. My first piece turned out not too bad…

Collage portrait

The second piece took a bit of work. I stopped relaxing and started thinking too much I think. My proportions were all messed up, but luckily the torn paper could be peeled off and repositioned before I’d gotten too far. Phew!!

So, although not so good its a valuable experience to not get it right. Aine was very helpful, she gives the voice to thoughts you sometimes already have and it’s a gentle nudge to reassess what you are doing and tweek it if it needs it. When it comes to the tweeking her advice is also very valuable. She can make a suggestion that sometimes I can’t always see, but while I’m in the class I get to try it out and learn from that experience. What would be the point in going if I wasn’t going to learn anything?

So, this is the other piece…

Second collage portrait

After this session I don’t think I was as elated as the previous week, but I was still super positive and pleased with the outcomes. I’m just trying to find the confidence to try more on my own. That might sound strange, but while I’m in class it’s like I have a protocol to follow (me and my science brain!). Outside of that I think perhaps the experiment could go horribly wrong! But I’ll have to do it at some point… and then perhaps I’ll be brave enough to try a self-portrait one day?