Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Life continued...

These were all done at the local recreation centre, where there is a model every week, but no tuition. I did a lot of trying out of techniques...above left, graphite with watercolour, right, conte with Caran D'Ache neocolor II Aquarelle crayons. You can see here models come in all shapes and sizes! Water-soluble pencil and conte crayon on the right...

More conte and Aquarelle crayons, and charcoal ...



I was getting braver to leave the charcoal/conte drawing and just use straight watercolour. I was hoping to get to a Georgia O'Keeffe style of clean, pure watercolour, but I couldn't let myself get that simple!
But I am quite pleased with the last one - that's the one that I may frame, though it's very pale.
That concludes my life drawing so far - hope it won't be too long before I do some more.

9 comments:

Adam Cope said...

lots of good drawings & watercolours here - you obiviously respond well to the discipline of being 'contained' in life-class rituals & time limits.

particularly like the wc with crop of the leg & toes

you might want to look at jean louis morelle's wc's of nudes

best
adam

Tom Barrett said...

Wow,these are great. I like how you have used a number of different mediums; will have to try that in my practice! I wish we had a rec center like that here. The last time I did life drawing was 10 years ago in college. Classes are a bit cost prohibitive for me right now.

Cathy Gatland said...

Adam, I looked at JLMorelle's website...could only find one nude of his - do you have a link for me?

Hi Tom - there's one energetic old lady who hires the rec centre, and the model, and the artists come and share the costs - if it weren't for her, we'd also be without this opportunity to draw

Actcrabby said...

Hi there. I just found your blog through Lauralines, and I'm enjoying it very much. All your life drawings look very, very good to me. I do love the strength and energy of the last one, and it doesn't look too pale by my standards, unless you dialed it up a lot in Photoshop. I'm guessing you don't see much fishbelly white in life classes in South Africa. It's pretty normal here.

Cathy Gatland said...

Hello Agnes - thanks for the visit! We get all shades - and some of us are very wary of the sun after gathering results of past over-exposures - so fish-belly (yikes!) maybe not, I prefer to think of it as magnolia petals soaked in milk :)

Adam Cope said...

http://www.amazon.fr/Journal-dun-aquarelliste-Jean-Louis-Morelle/dp/2215075848/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1203628180&sr=8-1

Cathy Gatland said...

Thanks Adam - I found one or two of his exquisite paintings. I would love to have his books, he seems to have quite a different approach...will save up!

Miz K said...

Stunning work - I particularly like the watercolor. There is a really interesting book called, "Painting people in Watercolor" by Alex Powers you might enjoy - the style is very modern and dynamic and brought a very new look to watercolor for me (which, now that I think about it, isn't shown at all in the watercolors in my blog, so ignore those ;-) )

Anonymous said...

I simply LOVE your figure drawings! I have class tonight, so seeing your work now, gets me inspired for tonight! Have you always done figure work?...Great work!
(And welcome back!)
ronell