A variety of useful points came up, some of particular relevance to me now at the start of Part 5 – these are in bold:
As we are not currently allowed to send our actual sketchbooks to our tutors due to the coronavirus restrictions, we can video a “walk-through of our sketchbooks and send that to our tutor, either by email or uploaded to the blog.
We could also video ourselves with particular artworks, e.g. A1 drawings, to give a sense of scale or particular physical qualities
New assessment guidelines are coming out, and digital assessment is highly likely
It is important anyway to develop our skills in creating digital images of our work as that is what happens in the real world (e.g. submitting entries for competitions)
I explained my idea for Part 5 of an investigation into ways of documenting my responses to a particular location through drawing – Dan referred me right back to the beginning of Part 1 and suggested that I consider the “temporary drawings” exercise, which might lead me to consider the question “What is drawing?”
Could I consider using some text extracts in my drawing, e.g. as part of a collage? (see Eduardo Recife)
Suggested artists to look at in connection with other people’s projects:
Xavier de Maistre’s “A Journey Round my Room” – an example of a jumping-off point for the imagination
Jo Spence and Terry Dennett
Helen Chadwick – Wreaths to Pleasure
Marina Abramovic
oca.padlet.org/stefanart/gkea8d4uaa87
Dan or someone in uni will send out details of Global Earth Day activities – or it will be on the blog – it’s a collaborative event
Just before I go through the individual criteria, I want to say how much I have enjoyed this Part of the Drawing 1 course; before having to tackle it, I would have moved heaven and earth to avoid having to draw a figure or face, but now having been made to do it, it has all been quite new to me and I have got so much out of it and learned such a lot.
Demonstration of technical and visual skills
My use of materials has been partly dominated by what I felt most comfortable with when using my left hand (being a natural strong right-hander) and by portability, as a large section of the work has been done out of my studio. Favourites have come out as Nitram charcoal (expensive but well worth the money), graphite (messy but fun) and drawing in natural ink dye using a bottle top dropper – very freeing.
Techniques: I have worked in line, tone (both by applying hatching and by removal of pre-applied medium) and a mixture of both. Drawings in line with minimal tone have dominated the quick pose sessions at my life group sessions, so I felt prepared for the large A1 line drawing (larger than I have drawn before – I am only 4 ft 11 in so it felt almost as big as me!) when I finally got to the assignment piece.
Observational skills: well, if they weren’t going to develop in this Part, they never would. I have looked and looked and looked again, trying to remember to forget what it was I was actually drawing and just think of it in terms of shape, form and tone.
Visual awareness, design and compositional skills: I was learning so much about drawing humans that I think this side of my work went onto the back burner a little until I got to the assignment pieces. I have been made to think however about when a whole body, part body or cropped part of body is appropriate to either fill a brief or to make an interesting image.
Quality of outcome
I have learned at a real rate in this Part and so at times my work reflects the learning which has gone on rather than a “finished” outcome – but I hope that, at this stage, this is partly a good thing. Hopefully I have been able to express my progress through this learning experience and my thoughts on it have come out via my blog and in my notes in my sketchbooks (I have a completely filled A3 book and broken into a second and a full A4 book – as well as loose sheets of bigger exercises and a hand-made A6 book for stealthy observations!).
Demonstration of creativity
Within the constraints with which I have worked during this unit, I do feel I have been experimental in my use of materials and my use of techniques. Having to use my left hand from scratch has been a learning curve in itself, but by now I am really enjoying working big and the freedom to be loose and sweeping where appropriate. I now need to apply some imagination and invention into the storage of large works of highly smudgeable art! Looking at my three assignment pieces, I am pleased with the development of my “voice” – I think it’s starting.
Context reflection
I was fortunate to be able to visit the London galleries in January 2020 and so look at a wealth of different artists’ approaches to the depiction of the human face and figure – not an area of art to which I’d paid too much close attention before, so good to have an injection of inspiration at an early stage. A couple of key texts – those by Chris Legaspi (Life Drawing for Artists, 2020, Quarto Publishing Group USA, Inc, Beverly USA) and George B. Bridgman (Bridgman’s Complete Guide to Drawing from Life, 1952, Sterling Publishing, New York/London), in particular – have supported my growing understanding of the nuts and bolts of anatomy and how to get started with the daunting task of representing a living, breathing human on a 2D surface. My learning log has been a key record; in the previous 3 Parts I learned a lot but it was by way of developing and adding to or changing aspects of art I had already tinkered with, but in this Part I have been learning pretty well from scratch, so writing stuff down has really helped to reinforce everything new.
For Christmas I was given Bell, Balchin & Tobin (eds for the Royal Drawing School), Ways of Drawing – Artists’ Perspectives and Practices, (2019). Thames and Hudson, London. This is just a fantastic book, so many ideas, takes and styles, and loads of great advice. This little extract was perfect inspiration for life drawing – it’s from an essay by Ishbel Myerscough called “Focusing on the Individual”:
“I try to encourage the alchemy of concentration. Drawing is like magic. If we allow ourselves to detach from the world around us and form a perfect bubble between ourselves and the object, to shake off feelings of expectation or embarrassment or indeed our own hope for brilliance; if we stay calm, treat the viewed in an almost abstract fashion, focus on the essential; if, at first deliberately and then unconsciously, almost meditatively, we remove the fact that we are looking at a nose or an eye, or even a head or a person; if we watch the way that the line of the inner eyelid lifts at the corner, the improbability of the shape of the shadow under the nose – if we concentrate that hard, not making judgments while we are doing so but forging ahead until the trance is broken, when there will be an opportunity to stand back and assess – if all that is truly achieved, then magic is made. Whether or not the observation is right, in proportion or even has a likeness, an intensity has been achieved, a point of fascination. And that is what a drawing really needs.”
Figure study using line (A1) – Seated model in an upright chair
Working on A1 posed some issues for me, in that I could physically only cope with this by working at my easel, which had previously been lugged with some effort into my attic studio – so I decided a studio pose it had to be. My studio is snug but my husband had volunteered to be my model and he is a very neat and tidy sitter – he was very accommodating and sat perched on a small uncomfortable wooden chair for quite a while through my preliminary sketches and on into the main work. Taking a leaf out of David Hockney’s metaphorical book when he did portraits of his parents, I decided to give my husband something to do while he was sitting – some sudoku puzzles, which he loves – so that he could get involved in those and relax into his pose a little.
An A1 line drawing bellowed big sweeping charcoal marks to me, so that is what I turned to. The composition turned out to be quite a challenge for me as I was looking down and sideways on my husband who was right next to me, leading to a considerable degree of foreshortening, and much measuring was needed to get the proportions right.
I got the feel of the drawing using a few sketches (felt pen on packing paper, charcoal and natural ink dye applied with dropper on sugar paper), and I took a couple of photos for reference as well in case Tim got tired of sitting.
I started my main drawing on A1 heavy cartridge paper using Nitram charcoal; I have used this for most of my life drawing groups as I find it easy to hold and wield using my left hand, and it is forgiving of error as my fine motor control can be random. I have become very used to working through mistakes at the life group, and so I tried to do the same here and stay loose.
I was surprisingly pleased with the outcome – I have tried to use a range of marks, think I finally cracked the difficult composition and proportions, and it does actually look like Tim. He was wearing a chunky fleece which fell into many folds, but I think I have got these in the right places and have indicated them sufficiently rather than faithfully trying to represent each one.
Figure study using tone (A1) – Reclining model
For the tone drawing, I was really keen to go back to a technique which I enjoyed back in Part 3, where I covered a page in charcoal and then drew into it with a putty rubber. This time however I had discovered, whilst tidying the studio a bit, my box of graphite chunks, so I played about with these and well as charcoal:
I loved Nina Mae Fowler’s charcoal drawings, for example her Luminary Drawings, some of which also appear to use a similar technique – see here : Charcoal on paper
29 x 44 cm, permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery
In the meantime the coronavirus restrictions began to bite, art groups fell away, and I was keen to social distance due to my predisposition to lung illnesses. Hence, I decided to take for my assignment piece a sketch I had done at an earlier life class – it had been a longer pose where I felt I had included enough tone details in my original drawing to work up into something bigger.
This was my original sketch (see first A3 sketchbook); I photographed it under an LED light and the photo came out unexpectedly blue. I rather liked the blue, so I decided to use a blue graphite block to lay down my background, rubbing it well into the paper with the heel of my hand before starting to lift out with the putty rubber.
This is the complete image…
..and this is a slight close up focusing on the figure…..
I really enjoyed doing this drawing – there was much standing back and looking, then stepping in to apply the rubber, then stepping back to look again. I don’t think I placed her quite correctly, there is a lot of blank wall (which unfortunately was just blank brick wall) in the top right quarter, but I left it like that as I felt the dark quarter set off the lightness of the figure and support, which were lit by windows on the left. I was especially pleased with the feet, I think I have got the light and dark tones of both of them well.
A portrait or self-portrait combining line and tone (any size)
In my research on other artists’ approaches to both portraiture and self-portraiture (see separate blog posts) I had been attracted to cropped images, such as this one by Escher :
(Self-portrait in shaving mirror, 1943, “Scratch” drawing, brown lithographic crayon. Haags Gemeentemuseum, The Hague) – as seen in Joan Kinneir (ed), 1980, The Artist by Himself – self-portrait drawings from youth to old age, Granada Publishing Ltd, Herts and London.
Escher seemed quite taken with reflections of himself when drawing self-portraits – this one which I found reminds me of the self-portrait which I did in Part 2, when I was reflected in the metal dome of a lamp:
Still Life with Spherical Mirror
1934, Lithography print.
Also, when I tried my own self portrait in an earlier Exercise (see blog post), I tried an angled and cropped image, and thought it would be something I should like to try again in this task.
Based on the Escher drawing, I found a little shaving mirror and tried holding it up with one hand and drawing with the other….serendipitously I could also see one of my earlier self-portraits stuck up on the wall behind me, so included this as a double portrait. I did it on A4 with a drawing pen, thinking to roughly emulate the size of Escher’s portrait – it was OK but felt a bit cramped. Then I looked again at the terms of the assignment and saw that I had to demonstrate the proportion of the features in relation to shoulders and chest as well as head, so decided that this composition did not really meet the brief – but I learned that I needed to work a bit bigger, and also not with pen which is a bit unforgiving.
I decided that, if I was including more of myself than just face and head, I’d like the rest of me to be in an interesting position – I had enjoyed the self-portraits of Artemisia Gentileschi when she placed herself in unusual poses. In my studio I have a couple of old oval wood-framed mirrors which are there because we haven’t found a place for them anywhere else – I don’t have any hooks to hang them from in the studio (it’s on the to do list, along with a cork-board wall) so they live on the floor propped against the wall. I experimented with arrangements which included one of the oval mirrors, the little shaving mirror and an interesting position, and came up with sitting cross-legged on the floor drawing on a propped-up board on A2 – this is the set up:
(excuse my husband sitting at my work table in the background marking a maths paper – we were self-isolating in the attic from workpeople downstairs). With this arrangement I could see two direct reflections of myself at different angles (in the big mirror and the small one) and also the reflection of the small mirror in the big one – so, a self portrait from three different angles.
I tried the idea out by sketching the face as shown in each of the mirrors in my sketchbook in pencil:
…and also the overall composition in my A4 sketchbook using a sepia charcoal pencil:
I started roughing the composition out lightly onto the A2 paper using a 4B pencil, which is the first thing which came to hand…..I would love to say that I dwelt on my medium for some time, but actually the 4B pencil felt fine so I stuck with it. I brought a lamp in and placed it on the floor to my right – I did try it out to see how it would look in the semi-dark, but my eyesight is not great and I just could not see things clearly enough for me to draw from – so my light sources were actually various on the day I drew the final version – I kept the lamp beside me on my right (not very strong); I have a skylight over my head to my right; and South-facing windows from the other attic room behind and to my left. The outcome of this is that the sides of the face are lit but the front of the face is more shadowed.
Well, I’m not sure how Artemisia did it – by the end I found I had “set” into a hunched forward-and-over position which I needed to reach the angled drawing board…shades of Yoda and Jabba the Hutt come to mind! Looking at it now, I do think overall I was this shape – I find I can always tell if it’s right if you go to draw a body part, and the other body parts which it meets up with are in roughly the right place.
I am pleased with bits – the main figure is the best, I think, because it was easier to see. Little details have gone well – the ear, the foot, the folds in the trousers around the knee. Other things are less good – eyes too close together in the main drawing, too far apart in the shaving mirror near me, best in the shaving mirror reflection – a bit like Goldilocks. Interestingly, I drew with my left hand, except for the shaving mirror image on the floor by me – without moving everything, I couldn’t really reach to draw this so switched to my right hand, and I think this is the weakest portrait of the three.
I hummed and ha-ed about how much background to include – it was very complicated and I thought I could lose the impact of the portraits, so I confined it to the mirror outlines, the chair and the drawing board – I think this works.
Graham Little’s portraits of striking women are frankly fabulous. Done in coloured pencil, they take – according to a Guardian review I read by Skye Sherwin (Nov 26th 2010) – many months to complete; remembering how stir-crazy I went trying to complete the first version of my Assignment 2 in coloured pencil, I think however that this method of drawing is not for me.
Elizabeth Peyton in some ways represents the opposite – her drawings and paintings appear much more rapidly rendered, using big watercolour strokes or strong and definite pencil/charcoal/crayon strokes. I found a book in the library about an exhibition of her work in New York’s New Museum entitled “Live Forever – Elizabeth Peyton” (pub Phaidon), and had a go at trying to draw in her style:
The charcoal drawing, using strong strokes, felt comfortable to me; the use of big brushstrokes in the copy of the Hockney portrait was less so, partly because it’s not how I’ve previously worked with a brush, and also because I haven’t done much brush work since breaking my shoulder as a brush feels more difficult to control with my left hand.
David Hockney’s upcoming exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, “Drawing from Life” was favourably reviewed in the Daily Telegraph (26th Feb 2020 by Alastair Sooke), although at the end he remarks “Hockney is no Rembrandt, we realise, heroically grappling with old age. Unlike Lucian Freud, he can’t convey the coarse density of lived-in flesh. No, Hockney is – or rather was – all ethereal refinement and sunlight.” I have to agree with Alastair Sooke here – I find Hockney’s portraits quite flat, a little like Gaugin’s – I did see a retrospective of his work in the Pompidou Centre, Paris, a couple of years ago, and this was my abiding impression, which hasn’t changed. A friend gave me a cutting of a review in The Times (Feb 24 2020) which compared a previously unseen version of a portrait of Hockney’s parents with a version exhibited in the Hayward Gallery in 1977 – we had a bit of “spot-the-difference” fun wondering why subtle changes in composition had been decided upon. His father had clearly become fed up with sitting and was engrossed in a newspaper in one version – something to bear in mind when asking people to sit!
(See cuttings scrapbook for both articles).
Looking back at the catalogue of the exhibition Pushing Paper – Contemporary drawing from 1970 to nowwhich I saw at the British Museum in January 2020 (see separate blog post on Museum visits), the portrait which still strikes me most is by Maggi Hambling, My Mother Dead, 7, 1988, graphite. The way the strokes are built up remind me a little of my own rather scribbly drawing style when I’m “reaching” for an image, and the fact that she has literally just drawn the face is very compelling.
On the subject of “floating” faces and heads, I was struck by Michael Landy’s portrait of his father, Daily Mirror, from the series “Welcome to my World”, 2004, crayon on paper, as seen in our recommended text, Vitamin D – New Perspectives in drawing. The way the carefully-observed drawing stops at the jawline really focuses attention on the face as we try to work out the nature of the sitter without the prompts of clothes, props, background, etc – the only clue given being the title of the work.
I looked at Nina Mae Fowler’s work online after listening to a BBC Radio Four podcast of a broadcast conversation between her and Nick Park (Only Artists – 26th June 2019). Like me, she enjoys drawing in graphite and charcoal, and is slightly embarrassed – as am I – over her excitement about her wide variety of erasers. She says that she spends 50% of her drawing time taking graphite and charcoal off the page to make the image. Nick Park was talking about his attempts to make a portrait of his wife (“she looks like Yoda sometimes”, which I felt very encouraging), and said that the portrait artist was surely trying to depict something beyond a mere likeness – NMF agreed but said that she felt that this came with practice…back to work then….
Chris Legaspi, author of Life Drawing for Artists – Understanding Figure Drawing Through Poses, Postures and Lighting, 2020, Quarto Publishing Group USA Inc, has honed his drawing method down to a formula of procedures which he can articulate and demonstrate, which has been very helpful for me as a beginner. His style has become recognisable to me, particularly I suppose because of his parallel shading technique using long lines – he sometimes uses these in his portraits to shade out a part of a face, which leaves the viewer to add in the details whilst highlighting the details in the rest of the face which is depicted.
…and I could not find a single drawn self-portrait of just her face. Her drawings of her body look quickly executed and her use of line is strong, almost visceral, but when it came to her face, this was either blank or very roughly indicated – as opposed to the rest of the body, especially genitalia, which are abundantly represented in the fashion of Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde, 1866 (which I saw a couple of years ago in the Musee d’Orsay – or maybe the Orangery – oh dear, premature senility – in Paris), and Egon Schiele was one of her influences. Possibly this is due to the title of the book, which was also the subject of an exhibition – the book suggests that in this exhibition, the artist is revisiting the trauma of her past in an attempt possibly to accept it and not be dominated by it.
Looking online I found a self portrait of her as a Little Owl, 2005, etching, which does bear an uncanny likeness!
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Lucien Freud and Paul Gaugin: see my notes in my blog post on trip to the London Galleries in January 2020 – the exhibition on Freud’s self-portraits was a masterclass in drilling into the soul – total determination to see everything there was to see and commit it to paper in bold brushstrokes. I found Gaugin rather the opposite – bold confident strokes in his drawings, yes, but his depictions felt flat and shallow and he often depicted himself as a character, almost caricature, rather than himself.
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I found an absolute gem of a book: Kinneir, Joan (ed), The Artist by Himself, 1980. Granada Publishing Ltd, Herts and London. The book consists of self-portraits by famous artists both current (e.g. Hockney) and historical – back to Durer in the 1400s. Accompanying each image is a text written by the artist him/herself – extracts from letters, diaries, exhibition notes and so on – which give an insight into the mind of the artist at or about the time when the self portrait was made. Absolutely fascinating. I had a go at copying several of the self-portraits – see my A4 sketchbook – just to experience drawing using their styles. I fondly imagine my own personal style is a bit of Odilon Redon with a splash of Egon Schiele…….
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There is an interesting article in March 2020’s Apollo magazine by Breeze Barrington entitled “Becoming Artemesia” – all about Artemisia Gentileschi, as a preface to the National Gallery’s exhibition of her work in April-July 2020 (nationalgallery.org.uk). She had, as Barrington describes, “..a penchant for self-portraiture..” – I really liked her Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (la Pittura), c. 1638-39, oil on canvas, Royal Collection – contrary to many of her other character paintings where she gazes placidly out of the frame dressed up in real Lucy Worsley-style – this is an action shot painted from an unusual angle – as is her Judith beheading Holofernes, c.1613-14, oil on canvas, Uffizi Galleries, Florence.
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On the subject of good books, another interesting one I found is by Borzello, Frances, Seeing Ourselves – Women’s Self-Portraits, 1998. Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York. This traces the history of self-portraiture by women from the 16th century to the end of the 20th century. The older paintings are in the style of their times – many conforming to the mores of the day, with a few, e.g. Anna Dorothea Therbusch, Self Portrait, 1762, oil on canvas, Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, showing herself warts and all – short-sighted and middle aged.
Berthe Morisot had a lovely use of light and line in her unfinished Self Portrait with her daughter Julie, 1885, oil on canvas, private collection.
The twentieth century opens up a whole new chapter in women’s art.
Gwen John shows an enviable confidence in her clear and simple line drawing, Self-Portrait Nude, Sketching, 1908-9, pencil on paper, National Museum and Galleries of Wales, Cardiff – obviously the result of much, much practice – no hesitant scribbly lines here.
Laura Knight’s Self portrait, 1913, oil on canvas, The National Portrait Gallery, London, which depicted herself looking at 2 nude female models, is a statement of intent.
Kathe Kollwitz, of course, portrays herself with strong directional lines and some dramatic cross-hatching in Self Portrait, 1910, etching, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco.
And Helene Schjerfbeck depicts herself almost disappearing in the skull-like An Old Woman Painter, 1945, oil on canvas, private collection, Sweden.
Strange and otherworldly shapes and surreal images start to appear under the hands of the likes of Leonora Carrington, Kay Sage and Louise Bourgeois.
Alice Neal, in Nude Self-Portrait, 1980, oil on canvas, Robert Miller Gallery, New York, bravely bares all at 80 in a clear and lively painting.
I had tried drawing self portraits before, years back – think everyone has a go at some time, don’t they? – but they were scary and severe efforts and I was determined to be a bit kinder to myself by trying to approach the exercise crabwise, almost creep up on it unawares, so to speak; so I chose an old battered piece of blue sugar paper from the bottom of the pile and a purple felt pen. I was drawing left-handed so knew there would be mistakes and a bit of a temptation to tinker – hence the choice of a support which was highly disposable and a medium which was fairly tinker-proof. What was going on the paper would be there, warts and all….oh dear….
I set myself up with a mirror propped slightly below my eye line and a little to my right – my memories of my previous full face attempts were not happy. I tried to relax and just go for it, letting the pen travel around the page so that nothing got too boxed in. I even left my glasses on, determined that I was going to rise to the challenge and not be fazed – if it was wrong, then that was ok.
Well, the outcome looked like someone, I think, although not me. Eyes definitely too close together, neck not wide enough. I showed the drawing to my husband and he agreed that it wasn’t quite me – I asked him to discount the cross eyes and the chicken neck and see if anything else was wrong, and he said he thought possibly the overall shape of the face. I left the drawing propped up somewhere and my husband did come back an hour or so later and said he had been looking at it again and he did think it was a bit like me after all (which was pleasing, although I hope he’s not referring to the cross eyes and the chicken neck…).
Getting out the battered blue paper reminded me though of all the more experimental stuff that I did in Part 3, so I decided to try a bit of that for my second self-portrait. I stuck down a piece of A3 paper at a skewed angle and laid down a background all over it in Conte crayon which I put on and then rubbed in with my hand. My art room has a fairly steeply pitched attic roof and I draw/paint underneath a wood framed Velux skylight; I didn’t want this to be a detailed background, so I chose the three colours of the wood (a yellow, a sienna and a dark brown) and laid them in stripes to indicate the Velux frame, then used a light grey for the sky outside and the white painted walls and ceiling. I propped up a mirror so that I had to look down and round into it, and drew myself using sienna Indian ink applied with a small flat brush.
The outcome is a little crazy-looking, and obviously the Velux background shows through the ink, but I didn’t mind that – I had to keep moving my head to see in the mirror, so I thought this sort of gave the idea that my head was the transient feature in the image, the background being fixed and therefore immutable.
It’s better – the nose is too wide and the right cheek (as you look at it) is too prominent – but I feel the odd angles and cropping give it energy and, better yet, my husband says that this one looks much more like me. On the basis of this, I’m thinking of trying for a similar cropped or skewed image for Assignment 4.
I had half an hour at an art group session after finishing something else, and started to sketch a face using a 5B pencil. I had no intention of it being anyone in particular – however, I had recently tried a self-portrait (see first effort in Exercise 2) so a slightly off-centre pose was in my mind, and I concentrated on trying to get features in the correct places (e.g. eyes not too close together, which is a bit of a failing of mine) and bone structure correct (including a decent sized neck). I kept the hairstyle and earrings I had drawn onto the self-portrait, still not intending the drawing to be me, but just because I had drawn them recently so had an idea of how they went (or at least, I wanted to see if I could remember how they went).
I am quite pleased with the result, in that it was fairly well proportioned (apart from the nearer eye being too big), I had avoided most of the traps fallen into previously, I had introduced a feeling of solidity through the use of tone and had produced a drawing which I thought could definitely be “somebody”. The comments of passing art group members however were interesting – a couple looked around at other members facing me round the table to try and work out which one of them I was drawing, and were a bit mystified when it wasn’t any of them – someone said “she knows all her facial proportions” – nobody suggested it looked anything like me or even that it reminded them of anyone else.
So have I drawn a portrait, or a head?
I think I’ve drawn a head. When I tried a self-portrait, even the one with the cross eyes and chicken neck, I think there was a sense of a person “present”, even if less perfectly conveyed – although I’m not sure why – the slightly anxious look in the eyes, maybe? My imagined ideal has no particular expression. I think, to me, that any portrait I made of a real person, whether it was myself or someone else, would conjure up to me the experience of painting and any relationship (close or transient) with the sitter, and I hope I would put something in it which I had closely observed to convey a fleeting glimpse of that person to the viewer.
Due to our ongoing deluge of late I haven’t been out and about watching people moving much (and in fairness, people haven’t been out moving for me to draw), so I have done quite a bit of sketching from photographs – left is a group of walkers, joggers, rugby players and hurdlers.
I have also been setting myself challenges such as 3 min drawings from the sports section of the newspaper, trying to get proportion in quickly, taking particular note of examples of foreshortening, and making my marks dynamic to indicate movement, as I hope can be seen from this example of footballers in action.
These drawings are in a little A6 sketchbook which I have made specifically for the purpose of carrying around in my pocket and surreptitiously taking it out to sketch unwitting bystanders – in a coffee shop, for example. Unfortunately, in coffee shops, people really sit and drink coffee and chat so many of my sketches from this sort of situation are of static poses, save for waitresses and baristas.
I have also had a go at sketching from TV programmes – had a go at “The Antiques Roadshow last night (it was on because my husband likes it and I was dozing off) – but actually there’s not a lot of action there either, mainly people standing in thoughtful poses or expounding….I feel the way forward is to rent a DVD of Die Hard or take out a subscription to Sky Sports…….
…but will keep on going with my little book, even if a lot of the time what I am catching is more poses than moving figures – it’s all useful stuff.
I am always people watching, so this was, I thought, an exercise which would come easily to me; however, I find that my people watching is much more about trying to infer (or, if more interesting, invent) peoples’ back stories, rather than observing all the bits of their bodies in relation to each other and other people…so back to the drawing board.
I started off with jazz club – a monthly event on Monday evenings in Tavistock in a rather dingy and ill-lit basement room, and a rather esoteric assemblage of quixotic characters. My husband (whom, I hasten to add, is completely normal) was giving the talk this time (it falls to a different member each session – apart from me, who could fit my knowledge of jazz comfortably on a postage stamp with room to spare) so I sat at the front with him and thus had leisure to survey the group and surreptitiously sneak a couple of photos, which I joined together at home in my drawing to make a panorama of the room.
I started off with quick portrait sketches of the characters before trying to fit them into the scene. I made the cardinal error of making the central standing figure too large, and they have all ended up looking rather like one of those odd cartoons you used to get in Punch magazine lampooning a particular set of people. Hmm….
I moved on to sketching West Devon Art Group members standing around and chatting, waiting for a demonstration to begin. I did them as individuals rather than forming a scene – some of them clocked me sketching, others were blissfully oblivious.
Next attempt was members of the Saltash Scottish Country Dancing group – I wanted to catch some action, but wasn’t confident they wouldn’t be inhibited by my sketching (some I knew would be fine, but a few others might be uncomfortable), so again, I took a couple of photos and drew them up afterwards.
The gentlemen did not come out of it too badly, but I struggled a bit with the proportions of the ladies – apparently after all this life drawing I really can’t draw figures with clothes on!! – and found it a bit difficult to place the knees which were hidden by skirts, so that the legs of the ladies look rather stunted.
I was happier in the second drawing that I’d caught a sense of movement through the swing of the clothing, though.
How successful were my attempts to retain an image of the scene to draw later on?
I find at the moment I am a bit “one thing or the other” – I either look really carefully at the people, making a few notes or sketches where possible, or I look at the background scenery and lose the details of how the people fit together in my head. The only time so far that I’ve made a real attempt to fit the people into the scenery was in the jazz club drawing (not terribly clear from this photo as I did the scenery in pencil and the people in pen, but can be seen better in the original – see A3 sketchbook), and for this I relied on my memory and knowledge of the people plus photographs. I think, for me, this is going to be the way forward for a while – I am probably still too slow a sketcher to get down with some accuracy the people and the background without either making them uncomfortable or unrealistically raising their expectations of the end result!
Sue J's blog 