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.

Life classes past

I was planning to post some little sketches I did on Sunday, and talk about my cat, BUT... the zeitgeist currently is pushing me in the direction of life drawing, life classes and groups. I read Africantapestry's post on it a week or so ago, and thought I'd love to get back to that, then my sister did a post on it yesterday, and this morning I found Katherine Tyrrell's usual thorough, well-researched and well-linked post on the subject.

So I spent the morning, unrolling dusty, cobwebby and fishmoth-chewed drawings from life sessions past - I've had them hanging around, some records of almost rapturous autumn mornings spent with an inspiring teacher, some stiff ungainly forays back into the genre after long absences, some I wanted to frame and hang, but was too protective of them from the 'nudge, nudge, wink, wink' brigade. All of them with the long-asked question hanging over them..."What on earth to do with them all?"

So this is what I'm doing - I've photographed them, rather badly probably, cleaned up the chew-holes and critter-droppings in Photopaint, and am posting some today, some tomorrow or the next (there are rather a lot), and then they'll all be here (forever?), and the gogga-food can mostly move on off to the recycle depot, I guess. Maybe I will frame one.

These are from classes and workshops with a wonderful teacher, Hermine Spies Coleman, who has since sadly for us, moved to Giverney in

Kwa-Zulu Natal. She was the most encouraging tutor, seeing promise and excitement in the greenest and most nervous life-newbie's efforts, and urging us all to seek the personal, the unique, our own interpretation of every model and every pose. She wasn't too hung up on proportion and measurements - as you can no doubt tell from these - but movement, thrust, animal-like qualities (pic 2 I was thinking of a cheetah I think), machine-like qualities (a spine becoming a drill in this one below), bone, muscle and sinew stretching and straining, she'd push us to break out of our comfort zones and we'd go home exhausted but elated.

The studio was sun-drenched, so strong shadows sometimes fell on the model - but that was turned to advantage when we were encouraged to see the abstract emerging on our pages.
This last one has bitter-sweet memories... while I was engrossed in capturing the twisted movement, my car was being pinched from outside the gate!