Life drawing at home!

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:

Year end

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

New source of fun

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:

Klimt on the heels of Kandinsky

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!

Collage with Lynn Whipple

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.

My sort of Kandinsky landscapes!

  • Market in Estonia (from a photo taken by a friend)
  • water feature at Arundel Castle
  • the waterfront at Fowey.

And my ATCs for our group for this quarter based (loosely!) on Kandinsky’s ‘Thirty’ executed on my iPad using Procreate – each one 2.5 x 3.5 inches and a visual challenge.

Lydia Rink Art Mixed Media Festival

I have been participating in this: 10 artists’ lessons and a Facebook page to show my results. Not everyone who was signed up posted their work which was a shame as it was nice to see what other people made of the demos. Here are the pieces I posted which I did in my A4 concertina sketchbook to keep them in one place. One demo was intended to be folded into a minibook and another was to make a triptych but otherwise it was okay done this size and the paper of the book is surprisingly resilient to gesso, ink, glue etc.

Concertina sketchbooks

I’ve been following some online workshops with Karen Stamper using these books. So far I’ve found the smallest too small, A5 just about right and A4 too big as it takes so long to do a spread and I can’t fit many pages on my table at once. I could turn each book over and complete the other side as well but I think I will just start a new book.