Neverending Wednesday

Last Wednesday was the first Life Drawing drop-in session! It made for a long day though, working at 7:45am, class at 4pm, then life drawing from 6-9pm. I was deeeefinitely a little pooped.

But here's what I got up to.

2-minute poses

2- and 5-minute poses

5-minute pose  

20-minute pose

30-minute pose

With the short poses, I started off using my hands as well as one of my clay tools. For the longer poses I decided to use my hands only. This limited the amount of detail I was able to create, but I found the mark-making and texture to be much more interesting.

I decided to play around with omitting parts of the body. This started with the omission of the heads, mostly because they are too heavy to deal with while the clay is in a wet stage, but also because of the amount of detail needed to make a good face. Mine end up looking cartoony in this format. So I played around with ways to resolve the issue by including only parts of the head and face to see how it would turn out. 

The jury's still out on that one, but hopefully with more life drawing sessions and experimentation, I will turn out something that I would like to pursue further. :)

Agile hands.

Last week I alluded to something that I'm working on that involves life drawing. I'm doing a ceramics directed study this semester, which is a course in which I create my own projects and goals under the supervision of a prof, who in my case is Scott Leaf. Last year, I'd attempted a ceramics directed study, but the topic I'd chosen to focus on lost its value to me and I was struggling with the amount of independence needed to accomplish things.

More than halfway through the semester, Scott had a very serious sit-down with me to talk about refocussing. He asked what I was passionate about, and the one thing I could think of was the drawing class I was taking. So we talked and I started thinking about how I could incorporate drawing into my ceramics studies. I decided to prepare clay and take it with me to life drawing.

These are only a few examples of what I came out with that night. From 30 second poses, to 5 minutes, to half an hour, I used up all the time creating as much as I could, and I had discovered something great. I loved it!

Three days later, the teachers went on strike. After a month of my pieces being wrapped up as tightly as they could be, locked away in the art building, we were finally back to classes. I ended up dropping the course for a refund so that I could retake it in the fall and have an entire semester to focus on this new topic, to get as much out of it as I could. 

Since life drawing hasn't started yet, I've started a study on hands. These are all life-sized, if not slightly larger, some modeled from my own hand, some from other people.

Weeee!

Drawing Life

I've never considered myself to be a very good drawer. Taking things out of my head and putting them onto paper has always been a struggle. But when I draw what I see, I feel much more in my element, and ever since starting drawing classes in university, I've absolutely fallen in love with drawing the human form.

Last year, my third year, I was in the final drawing class needed for my Visual Arts degree. I loved coming to class (yes, at 8:30 in the morning!) and setting up for a session with a model. I continually found myself staying later than the end of class to put finishing touches on my drawings, and swelling with a feeling of accomplishment.

These two in particular are ones I felt very proud of, and I'm hoping to be able to continue them as a series soon enough. The dark lines are ink drawn on with a stick or the back end of a paintbrush, coloured in with soft pastels.

It's this mixing of media that I've become increasingly compelled by, and though I won't have any more drawing classes in university, there is luckily a Wednesday night Life Drawing class that will start by the middle of October. It's there that I hope to continue experimenting.

I have many plans... but more to come on that soon enough. Stay tuned!