This is one of the two initial very quick sketches of the man.
This one is much bigger and was made in an unusual way: 15 minutes for first eye, 15 minutes for second eye, 15 minutes for the nose and 15 minutes for the mouth. The studio equipment allowed for focus on the feature being drawn and the model was super still!
More of the excellent sessions from DrawBrighton – don’t judge the marvellous models from my drawings! Especially when ‘drawing blind’ in some 1-minute poses it is easy to misplace or mis-size body parts! The model usually does 5×1-minute, 5×3-minute, 2×10-minute and 1×20-minute poses. The hour speeds by.
Some 1-minute poses
Some 3-minute poses
20-minute pose
A fall
A hug
a dance
QI JANUARY-MARCH 2026
The brief: ‘Why not incorporate maps into the theme for this quarter?
Maps help us get from one place to another. Maybe we use the paper map or perhaps you are dependent on GPS. We map all sorts of things… we map out our day. We have human maps of our bodies. We have walking maps especially in tourist locations. I am sure you can think of many ways we use maps.’
ATC size is 2.5 inches x 3.5 inches. I foraged for pictures of ancient maps, charts and plans in a huge book I bought from Oxfam for pennies. I made one big collage using the pictures and some titles and then cut the desired size cards from it.
From Anything Goes workshop cues: found text ‘poem’ and some pink combined.
An evening workshop with Royal Drawing School on Rhythm and Colour. Began with quick poses and then moving poses and finally created a ‘party’ with three versions of Arnold plus invented figures based on clothes hanging around the set.
In the Anything Goes course.
From my favourite source of scraps: Food magazine from Waitrose!
Another modern miracle: model in Argentina, sketchers worldwide. Excellently run workshop from Draw Brighton with 1 minute, 3 minute and up to 20 minute poses.
Another Royal Drawing School evening workshop. Here are a couple of drawings done with ink brush pen and water. We were given 5-15 minutes. The model sat beautifully still BUT the same could not be said for her features! She had a wonderfully twitchy nose like a rabbit and eyes which went from near asleep to wide open!
From the first lesson in Everything Jane Davies: here is a sample of collage built over layered paint.
This Royal Drawing School evening was arranged with the Getty Museum! And participants from all over the world. Here are my drawings:
The last was the life model on the right and from a screen version on the left – the life drawing is the one before.
I guess it is easier to draw from the model when it’s on-screen as it’s 2D already but it does feel different to drawing from a photo somehow.
On a day when my feet were two blocks of ice all day I went to the De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill to see an exhibition of work by Betty Parsons (1900-1982). I had never heard of her but it’s a nice place and by the sea. There were paintings and assemblages made from ‘acrylic on found wood constructions’. Here are some I liked:
Here are some small Minimalist Abstractions done with ink. I can never resist seeing a subject even when my intention is to be abstract!
And some pieces I saw which to me look random but are meaningful: at Tate Modern – huge aboriginal paintings glowing with colour. The art of Emily Kam Kngwarray
I recently saw an ad for the Royal Drawing School and had a look at the extensive list of activities, many online. I signed up for a 2-hour workshop on the Nutcracker Story. Here are some of the sketches I made of Clara with the Nutcracker, Clara killing the Mouse King, Snowflake Chorus, Clara dreaming:
I still have suggestions I should follow about Kandinsky but they are for another day. I went onwards with looking at some Klimt works. The course was not as specific and even included some AI artwork to follow. Think I prefer to use the original. I decided to use a little angel that came from a charity shop as the model for my work and made three versions based on different well-known Klimt pictures. Reportedly the works took 3 years but as they are huge and include gold work etc. I am not surprised – it took me long enough to work A4 size!
This is the last idea from the course I’ve been following. Loosely based on his Upward (1929).
Moving on now to another of my favourite artists: Klimt…
Here are the two collages I made for this short workshop. The under-layer is random scraps of ‘stuff’ to make a decorative base. You can’t see a lot of it remaining in the first one but the scraps are outlined with smudged pencil. The second one was done with coloured papers by Lynn but I didn’t have any so I used pictures torn from a Food magazine from Waitrose.
credmayne 