This model was such a funny, laughing, life of the party sort of person it made my drawings easy to do. I certainly did feel any concerns about making mistakes, and I made a number of quick drawings - say two x 5 minutes drawings within a 10 minute pose. This was a 20 minute pose. Aquarelle on paper.


20 minute pose. Aquarelle on paper.

colours

One of my drawing buddies suggested getting this gloriously cheap, slightly scary coloured paper from the Warehouse. It's not of a particularly high quality, but it's ok for fun and experimentation. This is my first take - ink and aquarelle. The paper is soft and unstable when wet which makes it not overly useful for the aqua part of aquarelle. I'll try next session with coloured pencils instead.


Oh dear - the coloured pencils are too hard for the soft paper, so the paper cockles a little, and I have to work the colour again to get it to show how I want it. I like the colored paper despite this and I think I can get a better look.

For some reason tonight I was inspired by the cave paintings of Lascaux. I felt very satisfied by the work and on the rare occasion I show my drawings from my books other people seem to like it as well. Aquarelle on paper.

Sometimes it's easy for me to get into a cruisy drawing mind set, and that doesn't always serve my work well. This was a short pose - 10 minutes - and the model exuded a real dynamism. I really like the drawing - much better colours in the real than here on the net. Aquarelle and gold ink on paper.


After the break we settled in for a slightly longer (15 minutes), and a more reflective pose. I find the short poses quite difficult from the perspective of wanting to get every last detail - but the quite poses end up looking less contrived. I envy my drawing buddies who can knock out a reasonable likeness in the time it takes me to connect a pencil with the paper. Practice, practice, practice.

relax, redraw

One of the great things about drawing is I find I can generally suspend judgment while I'm making the drawing and just fix things up. Here the yellow first sketch shows some issues with proportions - and then I've just redrawn over the same ground and corrected the drawing as I went. There's bit of a message for life there - simply go back, apologise, and get on with fixing it up.

The other big progress for me was seeing one of my drawing buddies mixing purple and orange - woah - it made me see in grey - and I liked it - things to experiment with. I've always found adding more colours (which is not the same thing as huge volumes of colour) has made my drawings more interesting. Note for your repertoire - add more colours. Aquarelle on paper.