Life Drawing, (R&D) - Continuous Learning

Approximately 3 hours each Tuesday are spent in life drawing classes, run by Prof Swindell. Whilst I have not previously blogged about life drawing during the start of this term, I have so far attended every session to date. I'm amazed to see that other students sometimes do not see the value of life drawing, as the numbers of participants has slowly dwindled from a full class of 12 people, down to just three of us yesterday.

Nevertheless, whilst I may be old-fashioned in my approach to learning what I believe to be crucial as a skill in contemporary art, it seems that there is a genuine benefit to me personally in my drawing development. It was very useful to explore a variation on drawing yesterday, by using alternative media to pencil, graphite or charcoal which have been the traditional mainstay of life drawing.

By using alternative media, in yesterday's case we used very dilute acrylic paint together with drawing ink applied on a horizontal surface of 150 g/m² Fabriano paper. Our drawing boards were placed on the floor, so therefore we had to sit and look up at the model which totally changed our sense of perspective of the body and of for- shortening.

Because we were applying ink with a fairly thick quarter inch hogs hair brush, there was plenty of run-off. Whilst the paper did not bleed the ink as it dried, we were able to use dilute white acrylic paint with a similar sized brush, to create a completely different style of painting. The results of which I was particularly pleased with.

As my blog is a public site I am conscious of the need for some reserve when displaying the output of life drawing classes. Therefore I apologise if the image shown in this blog may offend anyone, however I have chosen a suitably abstract painting of mine in order to demonstrate an example of style I was exploring yesterday.