Fencing Life Drawing

 

So we had Fencing instructor in last session for life drawing. This was a brilliant class. The model himself had done life drawing classes and as a result we got some excellent posing. 

I started off as usual with some graphite drawings. I think these the most successful of the session, the speed of the graphite allowed for some translation of the poses' speed.

(as a bonus, the instructor himself felt I caught the poses right)

When drawing using the graphite, I blocked out the torso and then worked in the lines.

happy with the near knee here

The model liked this pose

 Probably my favorite of the graphite drawings

I then returned to the technique I used the previous session. Don't think it worked as well this time, the samurai costume suited it better I think. Still, some of it worked... think I got bogged down with drawing too much.

Here the elements on the right work better, the arm and leg. However  I then worked in too much on the torso.

 

 

The leg works well here. (had to go in and erase some stuff in the torso)

Instead of blocking out this time, tried just using the edge

Again the elements on the right are closer to what i wanted.

Life drawing - Aiki Jujitsu

So last week we had an Aiki Jujitsu model for life drawing. Think of it as a samurai.

It was a pretty great class. Had been a while since I'd drawn a model with cloths on and the costume he wore was great. (I joked with Pete that it was kinda like drawing a Jedi)

It was also the last class that Simon will be at and we sat together. Think it worked out really well for both of us, having someone beside you trying out some new approaches. Here's his blog http://tweakoverkill.blogspot.ie/2012/08/lifedrawing.html



The first set are where I used graphite stick.

 

Tried out poster paint and instead of a brush, used card to paint with. Very happy with the results.

probably my favourite one

The Spainard!

 In honour of Spain winning the Euros I'm posting the first of my new set of boulder caricatures. It's Borja, the head of I.T. and lead comper on randy. This Spaniard is use to winning, he beats me in tabletennis every chance he gets!

Other Borja attempts

Mikey!

Here's the sketch I posted on the boulder art blog too. The theme was power animals. Never finished the 2 pics I started this morning for it cause I threw my back out. Sitting here in pain I'm cursing getting old!

Life drawing week 5

This was a tough week. Wasn't feeling the best and we had a new male model. Anatomically he was pretty muscly. Found it hard with all the detail to simplify the poses, don't know why. Also tried compressed charcoal sticks for the first time. Was never a big fan of charcoal, something to do with the sound of it on newsprint. But Aine was doing some deadly stuff with it.... so I wanted to give it a try.

30 seconders, tried to push anatomy (Colin liked this one)

My favorite drawing of the session

Another inverted one. Really happy with this one.

Went more square for these.

This was an attempt to capture the pose in pure silhouette. Probably my second favorite drawing of the session.

Trying to "build" up the pose in layers.... gonna try this on a long pose some time.

 

Like the more square shapes in this.

Photoshopped - added the shadows, happy with how it turned out.

Tried some marker stuff. Worked internals first, then built out to outlines.

Finally Framed!

These are the pieces I bought in the first Boulder art charity auction. Really happy with both of them. The dinosuar is a Chris O'Hara canvas piece, and the bear one is by Aine McGuinness. It's a beautiful watercolour that I bought for Sinead.

The girls raised over 2 grand and next month hope to repeat the success but on a larger scale.

Life Drawing week 4

Should have posted this ages ago. This was a particularly enjoyable week for me. Tried a technique that would influence the next 4 weeks. You can see it develop over the first 3 drawings here.

  These 2 are where I inverted the images in photoshop. I unfortunately love doing this.

 Added the dark under the arms later - kinda think it works in the thumbnail, not so sure once it's at full size.

Umbrellas

So here's the piece I submitted for the charity auction in work. Its a piece I did ages ago for a boulder gallery Franners was doing. It's originally part of a triptych but Sinead loves the other drawings so i kept them. Probably do some more now too.

The piece itself is an A6 postcard drawn using blue ink. Think my favorite umbrella is the one at the back.

2 posts in one night!

So in work we have a gallery set up for a charity auction. And Estrela and Bianca have been pushing for people to produce some work. The image I submitted was an old "umbrela" one so I'll post that tomorrow. But here's the image I did tonight.

Obviously I'm a huge Mignola fan, and well it does have an effect on my work. But hey, that can't be bad right. The image is named after the song I was listening to on the way home from work today, by the great Wolf Parade.

It was maybe gonna be a profile pic change for facebook too.

Life drawin'

So Boulder has set up life drawing sessions for us in work. Been a couple of years since I sat in a room doing this, so alot of the work was fairly rough, but I was happy with a couple, and most had some sections I liked.  They were all gesture drawings ranging from 30 secs to 5 mins.

 

 The First 2 were from the first 30 mins section. The first drawing was picked out during the review as a good drawing by the people in the class. Was a bit shocked by that. The last drawing was picked out during the second review. It was picked for the change in approach I used. I tried to use purely straight lines for it. I wanted the pose to look ridget like model appeared to be.

Within 5 minutes of being in the class I was pretty happy. Although I dropped into some old techniques I like to think Beth Spenader was sitting behind me egging me on again. The drawing off the page was at times a deliberate thing. Working on A3 I wanted the drawings to be too big for the page (something Beth use to encourage me to do in college)