It is hard to capture the likeness of people but I think I am slowly making progress with Yasmin. I still have some way to go but little by little I’m learning how to draw her better. Funnily it is easier to work when she is busy doing something else rather than trying to sit still for me. Those stiff poses I really struggle with. The images below are other sketches completed recently.
Above is the culmination of a collage series I started a few days ago. The others, with varying degrees of success, are below. They are fun to make. The manual work of cutting and glueing the coloured inked papers a pleasant methodical process. Mysteriously, they suddenly make surprises of images I’d not foreseen.
This is so garishly bad I quite like it. The colours could not be further from my intentions. I’ve tried so many times to capture the park’s field of space and every time fail. Here I do so again. Next time.
Back at Tottenham Art Classes I try a different way of working inspired by the tuition at the RDS. These are fast ink washes as I sip beer in the Beehive Pub.
Taz and Tom run Tottenham Art Classes focusing on life drawing sessions at the Beehive Pub off Tottenham High Road on Thursday evenings. Having moved to South Tottenham several years ago, to discover there were no local life-drawing classes, they decided to set one up of their own. The untutored sessions have a good mix of people of all drawing abilities who are extremely helpful and encouraging. A beer, life model and drawing makes for a great creative evening.
Through the autumn of 2018 I attended several drop-in life drawing classes at Candid Art behind Angel Islington, London. They were busy sessions with interesting and good models. Typically, as with lots of classes, they started with quick 5 minute poses and drawing warm-ups, that gradually extended. After a coffee break there would be a longer pose of 45-50 minutes and the drawing above is the result of one of these.
Initially the model seemed difficult and uninteresting to draw because of their slight frame. This can sometimes make a figure’s appearance look disproportioned with too long legs and arms. However, somehow I managed to capture this elongation and angular form, with a good likeness. The model was a delight to draw, with interesting folds and a slightly collapsed position on the studio’s chair.
We spent much of last Wednesday’s class at RDS using our non-drawing hand for mark making and swapping our work from 20 minute model poses with others. The above is a joint effort from myself and Veronica using our good hands.
It really provokes a different way of working and thinking when trying to interpret another’s drawing. For me using someone else’s work felt like using a road map where some of the picture’s journey had been outlined and I was adding to it by helping give direction. A kind of filling-in or fleshing out of another’s work. It also showed how others observe shapes and form and how technically they work, challenging you immediately to look more closely and differently and to adjust the ways you’d usually draw.
Art from a Bicycle 