Drawing the Nude

Life Drawing at the AGO

The last few weeks I have been going to the drop in life drawing session at the Art gallery of Ontario. It's in a really super space. The room is huge with a very high ceiling and they have several classes going on at the same time and the life drawing is at the centre of it all. What I like is being able to walk around during the break and see what the people in the painting classes are doing. It's a great atmsophere and I have already met some very nice people.

My life drawing is pretty rusty but even after a few weeks I can feel it starting to come back. I have posted a photo here of one of the pages from today's session. Because the poses are very quick, the average lasting around 5 mins, I like to do several on a page. I'm not concerned about making something pretty, it's just a matter of getting something down. You may wonder what all the marks are across the figure, well it's just to break up the shapes and if I do a lot of images on the same page it starts to build interesting patterns. It's great to be back drawing again after all the goings on of the last few months.

Experimental Paintings

Yesterday I went to my weekly life drawing group at the Atlanta Artists Center. I really enjoy it especially when the model is interesting as she was yesterday. I like to either just do a charcoal drawing or if I am painting I want to try something different and work in a way I don't usually do. These are my experimental paintings and I am not really interested in trying to make a pretty painting. Yesterday I worked in oil pastels on a board that I had painted with the left over acrylic on my pallet. The board was very textured and the paint very random and messy. Most of the colors were primaries so it was very bright. The oil pastels sat up on the textured surface leaving much of the underlying pattern showing. It's certainly not a neat finished looking painting but it was a fun experiment. I will add a couple of pictures showing the detail so you can see the effect. I called it "Looking to the Future"