'Figuring it Out'

I've spent today in Barnsley, South Yorkshire attending an art workshop at the OCA's head quarters. After a 4 1/2 hour round trip and lots of sketching all day, I'm shattered, but I'm thrilled with the day's result.

Having left home about 7am and after a rather stressful and foggy trip north, I arrived early for a change (wonders will never cease I hear you say!) After the normal introductions to the other 5 students our tutor talked through the use of backgrounds and foregrounds in our work, the use of light and tone and other such important aspects, all of which help to achieve a more 'complete' image, which was really the subject of the work shop after all.

Then it was off to work. We were lucky to be working with an excellent model, whom I became more and more impressed by as the day wore on. No flinching, twitching, itches, in fact no movements at all! In fact we all agreed that as the time flew by for us we even forgot the model was a living person and suddenly an hour would have gone by before we were called to a halt and still no hint of movement from our model!

Our tutor gave us some good tips and ideas for working sketches, a sore point for me as I'm a real failure in this aspect, but boy did I find them useful and now I understand their value. The course I'm currently doing is always rattling on about working some prelim sketches before attempting a new peice but of course I know better! Well I do now.

Of course there were many more sketches than the few I've published here and although these have no real merrit they at least give you some idea what I'm talking about.

So then we tried our hand at the first 'longer' study with the model still in the same pose as that used for our sketches, but this time we were encouraged to look at various sections of the figure rather than the whole.

I loved doing this!

There was never any emphasis on us to get it lifelike, just looking at the shapes created by the model, the clothes, posture and then to incorporate some background contrast (the model had a black curtain behind their chair)

After this some longer sketches came along, punctuated only by some lunch and debate on techniques, styles and abilities!

My favourite is the 'blue' one. Although none of them are perfect by any means (lets face it the proportions are too far off track to be anywhere near perfect) but somehow even with this fundamental problem I htink they have feeling, depth and even movement and thats why I'm so chuffed with them. Of course I'll keep working on my abilitiy (or lack of!) to get the proportions 'right' so to speak, but in the meantime its important to me to keep on enjoying what I draw and that to me means the finished peice must have something about it that gives me a spark or two whenever I look at it.

Our day came to a close as we finished with some experimental techniques and a bit of fun. My favourite was the amateur printing technique. We took a piece of clear perspex and holding it high and directly in front of front of us we used an oil pastel to trace the outline of the model directly onto the perspex. Then reversing the perspex we drew over the lines with black paint. Having lightly misted a peice of paper with water we then placed the painted side of the perspex directly onto the damp paper, thus transferring the black outline of the model. It was fun but more than that it really showed the perspective and fore shortening of the models outline.

This may not look much, but with some imagination this result could be worked on even further and I think it could end up as something quite good.

So that was my day! Hope yours was as interesting and rewarding!