12 posts tagged “drawing”
it's a lifelong addiction for me. i just can't help it. i'm not really happy unless i'm plotting or doing a course of some sort and i was getting a little fretful because i don't know that i'll be able to afford to do the drawing class i want to do at central st martin's (drawing london on location) and i don't know that i'll be able to sort out and get into the one-to-one composition tuition short course at tvu for this year - i could probably sort it out for the october term, but i suspect i'd have to miss at least 2 sessions due to our plans to go back to australia for christmas, so maybe next year.
then this dropped into my inbox:
tate online courses: artists' techniques and methods
which sounds really interesting, covering techniques for drawing, collage, watercolour, composition and symbolism, oils and mixed media. all for £20 and i don't have to go anywhere! very tempted by this one...
home from all the travelling at last! and it's not really like i have anything terribly much to say, but i thought i should at least pop my head up so you didn't all think i wuz dead. so i guess i shall summarise:
- switzerland was great. snowy mountain walks on my own, hot tub with friends with an awesome view of the alps, too much food, definitely too much wine, lots of drawing
- france on the way back was also great. fabulous church service stumbled on at random in nancy, followed by a promenade with the citizens of the town through the sunny streets and park. reims we didn't see so much of, but a very nice cathedral with rather marvellous stained glass windows by chagall. oh and champagne, being the champagne district, and yes, we did bring some home :-)
- am now immersed in the jobhunt. i have an interview tomorrow with 7digital which scares me somewhat - scares me because it sounds like it could be an awesome job (working on music download sites) but would entail 3 hours' travel each day again. and is permanent. but we'll see how the interview goes. if we really have to, i guess we could move to hackney. hmm.
- i have found myself a nutritionist and will be seeing her for the first time on thursday. hoping she can do something about my myriad health issues which the doctors don't really seem to know or particularly care what the causes are.
i've been doing a fairly vast amount of drawing lately. no music whatsoever, but the visual ideas are flowing freely and fast and my composition journal is filling up. here are a few samples:
back from paris now. and next weekend we go to switzerland skiing for a week with some friends. djeli is dying to go skiing, but it's looking like i won't be able to ski at all because while we were in paris my leg and foot started to swell again and the whole left leg has been uncomfortable (to the point of needing the heat pack again) all week. i blame the paris metro. all those stairs. grr :-) but at any rate, i doubt very much that i'll be skiing while lopsided, so i need to make a plan that involves accompanying djeli on his drive to troistorrents (nearish lausanne) and then playing hermit for a few days to do some work while avoiding the 2-year-old that apparently populates the place where we'll be staying, and maybe fitting in a day-trip or two to lausanne and/or berne as well.
paris was pretty good though. my french is getting better and better and i was quite shocked to discover that i had better french than anyone else who was there (we went with two of djeli's sisters and their families). i've now got to the point where i can natter a bit with shopkeepers and don't feel so flustered about asking them to repeat themselves if i don't understand because i feel now that if they repeat, i have a chance of working it out, and sometimes they simplify the vocab too, which makes it easier. we did a bunch of touristy stuff because none of the kids had been to paris before, so there was notre dame, with attempts made on the saint-chapelle (closed), the conciergerie (closed), a view from a particular department store that susie (older sister) had been told was great (closed for refurbishment) and djeli's and my absolute favourite-ever patisserie and home of the chocolate-encrusted brioche (closed down); then the next day to the science museum (always very cool and my translation skills much improved over the last time we were there, thank heavens), then the eiffel tower and our favourite posh supermarché out at porte maillot which spared us from the tedium of a fourth trip up the arc de triomphe in three years. and then a little required shopping at sephora and the galleries lafayettes food hall on the last day. i'm looking forward to going back again soon. i really really want to go to the (i think) palais de tokyo where they keep all their early-mid twentieth century art - matisse and so forth, and also thinking that i should make a concerted effort on the louvre sometime - maybe a three-day midweek trip on my own, sketchbook in paw. might try catching the bus across. i adore the eurostar, but if i can stand the bus then it's likely to be a lot cheaper, and it was quite bearable from brussels to london. must start trying to cut back on the 5-star travel...
i took delivery of two new books between copenhagen, sussex (where we went for new year) and paris - the last of my gift voucher bonus from PwC (which I have to say has been the best bonus ever) - both of them excellent. The first is a tiny little book by an advertising guru called paul arden and is called it's not how good you are, it's how good you want to be which is an excellent summary of all sorts of things i need to keep reminding myself of with my work and i'd recommend it to anyone who needs a pocket-sized kick in the artistic pants every now and then.
the second one is a book called inspired which is a series of interviews with assorted creative folk, looking at where they find inspiration, what their working environment is like and so on, with a ton of photos of creative journals, collections of this and that, and brilliant workspaces. i find the creative process and the different ways people approach it to be absolutely fascinating and this book in itself is amazing and has inspired me to be a bit more creative with my own creative (mainly composition) journal. i always thought i must be a bit mad to keep the ton of bits of paper that i do simply because they have an image that intrigues me on it - i like the texture or the colour or the shape, or it makes me smile and i can't throw it out - but reading this book one thing i found was that about 80% at least of the people interviewed confessed to collecting something - from adidas shoes to fabric swatches and packaging - so now i don't feel quite so weird and i'm starting to stick these random bits and pieces into my composition journal so they (a) don't clutter up the place and gather dust and (b) can be got at when a little spare inspiration is required. i'd much rather store a bunch of composition journals than a box full of little pieces of paper i'm not looking at. anyway, it's an excellent book and so many ideas to play with! now i want to do EVERYTHING - i want to paint and collage and draw, and write music, and write lists, and dance and walk and tidy and bake - all sorts of stuff.
i'm really enjoying this box-sorting (although a shame we've got so little time to do it in). i have now dug out a bunch of my art materials - my winsor & newton studio set of water colours, winsor & newton soft pastels set, my random collection of the utterly delectable sennelier oil pastels, and some other bits and pieces. and today i got to play with them too. djelibeybi requested a portrait of noel, my australian-resident teddy bear, to go with the portrait of jacques-etienne i did back in london. it's been quite a while since i've drawn anything, and an extremely long time since i've used pastels at all, but i think the result's not too bad for a first attempt, although it doesn't look quite like him - a rough resemblance rather than "oh my goodness, that's noel!". i'll be having another go sometime soon. i particularly like the way the oil pastels worked for the eyes and nose, against the chalkiness of the soft pastels. will play more with this. the paper is canson mi-teintes black pastel paper.
the last couple of days have been really good and now i have actually been enthused about my piece and started hacking up bits of recordings to make the tape part.
on thursday, dejli and i went out to a music technology expo at olympia. i did feel rather a fish out of water, as i'd expected, being probably just about the only exclusively classical musician in the place (well, it felt like it anyway) but I learnt some stuff and had a great time just wandering about drooling at all the equipment and wishing i played the guitar or had any sort of aptitude for creating pop music. one of the demonstrations we saw was a girl with a guitar demonstrating some sort of foot-pedal contraption that not only adjusted the sound of her guitar, but also gave her instant on-the-fly backing vocals by transposing what she was singing. amazing stuff. i watched a bit of a masterclass on mixing and picked up some tips but mostly just drifted about. talked to the musician's union and peered at some bits and pieces and had a long chat with the chap from sibelius which was very enlightening - it's come a long long way since i reviewed version 1 for sounds australian! and i got a show special on a subscription to computer music magazine - 3 issues for £3 then 30% off for the rest of the year - which i was happy about :-)
and then when they kicked us out of the expo, we went to hammersmith and saw hot fuzz. i'd been a bit unsure about this movie - the trailer looked good, but the synopsis sounded like a classic displacement story and i was a bit worried it would fall flat on its face. but no. and no with a vengeance. i haven't laughed that much in a movie in a very very very long time. i think i even guffawed at one point (fortunately the cinema was mostly empty so this didn't really affect many people). the splatter element surprised me at first, until i remembered that it was made by the same people as shaun of the dead which explained a lot. and now i have to see that film, i think.
yesterday was quite low key. i drew eggs.
i made lemonade. i went for a walk. i made pizza (yes, the dough included) which turned out awesomely, if i may say so - prosciutto and mushroom with a big bowl of lettuce to wash it down. i played around with the musique concrète tutorial in the latest issue of computer music and then played around with the tape part for my satie song arrangement. i've been given permission to use bits of recordings from the fabulous cylinder preservation and digitisation project site, among which i found this gem:
i'm pleased to be able to report that i am quickly getting into the swing of my unaccustomed freedom. last week was a bit odd what with being a half-week and all, but i finished the last of my set of two-part inventions, started updating my website, went to the turner prize exhibition at tate britain (i had intended to see the holbein exhibition instead, but it turned out to be completely overrun with herds of OAPs and booked solid two hours in advance and i just couldn't be bothered), then wandered around the real turner section (found a very nice display based on artists and students copying his drawings, with their comments on what they had got out of it, which was very interesting), and discovered some newly catalogued stuff from the john & myfanwy piper collection - including a letter to mp from benjamin britten which had me rather chuffed. jp's paintings and drawings are really very intriguing. i'm looking forward to spending some more quality time with them :-)
on saturday night, we went out to the movies which it feels like we haven't done in ages. we settled for stranger than fiction as probably being fairly light and fluffy and subtitle-free (i.e. not like perfume or pan's labyrinth which were the only other really strong candidates), and i have to say, we were both taken by surprise. it's a great movie, in spite of will ferrell, whom i generally avoid like the plague. emma thompson and dustin hoffmann were both fabulous, and the story was quirky and sweet and generally lovely. a really genuinely charming film.
our jaunt to wales for new year was fun, although a little stalked by doom - it started off with wandering round in the dark and freezing rain for an hour hunting for a key that wasn't there, then housebreaking the next day (us breaking into the place we were supposed to be staying in, not other people breaking in to take our stuff), followed by days and days of horizontal rain and lots of mud (i like this sort of weather, but others don't seem to, so rather than being out tramping around in it, there was a lot of sitting around or else drifting round small shops). it ended with food poisoning for djelibeybi, and a hissy fit by my digestive system for me. so while everything else was good (killer bunnies was an absolute hit with adults and kinder alike) we were really rather relieved to be home!
onwards now... off to the library to nab some books on arranging so i can start my next piece :-)
but obviously the need to do something crafty for the season was lurking there, insisting to be let out. i don't know why it is that australia is full of superb and stylish and witty christmas cards all saying "made in england" but here in london there is just a super-abundance of girly tweeness and crude fart joke cards. the best one can do is art-gallery cards, but they're just not right for everyone. i managed to find cards for everyone except djelibeybi, who is always a bit hard to find something appropriate for. so then the idea popped in for a cup of tea - and stayed for biscuits, dinner, pudding and the mulled wine afterwards. why not *make* him a card?!
it has since occurred to me that the why not is because he probably won't even notice it, and if he does, he'll wonder why i've drawn him a shifty-looking robin standing in dodgy snow because while it is christmassy, it is SO not the sort of thing i'd usually get him. but i'm very bad at thinking of jokes and no chance of trying to just invent some image to go with a joke, so i adapted a robinny design from a card we already had and now i'm thinking that i might have done better to have just saved 5 hours and given him the original card. um.
still, it was an interesting experience, and i learnt a lot about coloured pencils (lesson number one - NOT a fast medium!) and while the robin may look shifty, i think he still looks moderately like a robin. unfortunately his snow is dodgy because i had to go out and buy a white pencil because my paltry set of 12 el-cheapo watercolour pencils didn't have a white. but it seems that the posh derwent pencil didn't want to play nicely with the riff-raff and came out sort of gritty and odd.
but the christmas feeling is really starting to kick in now (obviously!). i went carolling last night, because they do this in an organised way in our neighbourhood, and man it was AWESOME. sooooo much fun. and we attempted parts even though they sort of collapsed from time to time and i kept on inadvertently singing the bassline because that's what i used to sing at school (an all-girls school, in case you're wondering!). and we had tealight lanterns on sticks and everything. and at the end, the last house we went to invited us all in for mince pies and mulled wine while we thawed out. fantastic.
anyway, i'd just like to take this opportunity for shifty robin and i to wish all you fabulous voxers out there a superlative christmas. eat, drink, be merry and enjoy the queen's speech :-)
last night was the last class of my drawing course, and what a wonderful time we had. our tutor took us to the national gallery to draw paintings, which is something i've been wanting to do for a while, and am wanting to do when i finish work, but i had no idea where to start. it's funny, cos in theory it's simple - take sketchbook & pencil, go into gallery, pick painting, sit down & draw, but actually doing it is quite hard because you're exposing yourself and your drawing abilities or lack thereof to all the passing traffic. and with so many paintings, how do you pick one that would be good? and do you look at the whole composition, or just details? so it was nice to just be guided round a little and given some ideas, and some enthusiastic quick lectures on specific works (he took us round the cézanne in britain exhibition that's on there now, which was really interesting. will have to go back - for sure!) and to try it out in a group to start with. i was quite pleased with my efforts too and will endeavour to post them once i've found the time to photograph them and make adjustments. certainly way way better than i could have done back in september, before i started the course.
it's been a really great course and i'd recommend it to anyone who really wants to learn how to draw. i've learnt so much in the past 12 weeks, i really have. and best of all, i'm a lot more confident about what i'm drawing, and not so scared of showing it to people. i've even started joining in the weekly drawing forums on www.wetcanvas.com and this week i was really pleased with my drawing, and all the more so because i did it all by myself. true, someone suggested charcoal and going with large paper for their own effort and i nicked the idea, but the approach (toned ground) and ways of rendering the darks and lights and detail were all my own work and i think it came off rather well. other people said some nice things too :-)
so it was a great class, coming at the end of a humungous but fabulous work day. we had a workshop at the posh office (meant i had to hunt out a decent-looking skirt and try to look like i made an effort rather than appearing my usual scruffy self) and it all went really well, i think. i was actually early (got there at a quarter to nine!!!) and everyone showed up and all the sections went well, the discussions were heated but fun and revealed quite a few things and resolved some lingering issues, and we got through everything with a little time to spare even. and even though i couldn't go to the dinner cos i had my class, i got to join everyone for pudding afterwards at the admiralty restaurant at somerset house (i had the cheese platter, in case anyone is curious. it was ok, but not really fab. could have done with some grapes or dried fruit and maybe some less intense biscuits).
all in all, a fine day's work. very satisfying :-)
i've been looking more closely at a number of people's drawings lately - in particular, danny gregory cos tchachke reminded me, and mattias adolfsson because his drawings always make me smile and i seem incapable of letting a day go by without checking his flickr stream - and got all excited by the idea of pen and watercolour wash. but the only suitable pen i had wasn't waterproof, and i only have watercolour pencils, which aren't so fab for washing, so i decided to at least partially rectify the situation and invest in a waterproof pen. i chose a staedtler pigment liner, with a 0.1 tip, which i have to say i'm loving. i don't generally use felt-tip pens of any sort because i worry about a lack of waterproofness and whether even a waterproof one has its limits (sideline: i sometimes fear i have more interest in posterity than is healthy - ten to one i'll never become famous enough to have anyone be interested in my notebooks) but i'm really enjoying the feel of writing with this pen, and the nib being nice and thin means small & mostly tidy writing in my rather packed diary, which is a good thing.
anyway, i decided to finally have a test of it for drawing with watercolour, so i made a sketch in pencil and then went over the lines in my nice new pen. the best subject to hand at the time was the ever-patient and motionless jacques-etienne camembear ('camembear' because he's white and squishy - and, of course, a bear), and i was quite pleased with the resulting portrait - well, the face and scarf anyway (i only realised i should have paid more attention to his lower half after i'd moved to go and get the watercolour pencils, which meant that he'd moved too...).
i think i'd have preferred a more colourful subject for playing with the watercolour bit, but i made the most of the scarf (two different shades of red combined - the red of my watercolour pencils actually blends very nicely, the black not so well) and tried to make his nose and eyes as black as possible. also made an attempt at some shadows, although i fear that wasn't quite so successful.
at any rate, i enjoyed the combination of media, so think i'll try to experiment with it a little further, maybe over the weekend.
a couple of weeks back i think i mentioned that i was considering buying betty edwards' drawing on the right side of the brain, a book which takes the approach that drawing is a fundamentally right-brain activity which is hindered in non-draw-ers by intrusive left-brain behaviour. the book talks quite a bit about the functions of each brain and how these work independently and together, and sets out a course of exercises based on edwards' principles to teach users to draw by learning how to shut down the intrusive left-brain messages, in favour of right-brain perceptions.
i decided to work my way through the book because i've been taking an introductory drawing class at central st martin's art college over the past few weeks, and in week 3 of the course i realised that i had issues with perspective because i was having issues estimating angles and lengths of lines - spatial relationships, basically. i didn't want to be held up from learning anything else in the class and wanted to make the most of it, but i knew i couldn't do that without addressing this pretty fundamental area of drawing, so i made the decision to devote a little extra time each week to gradually working my way through DotRSotB, figuring that even if it didn't live up to its (pretty impressive) reputation (read the reviews on amazon if you haven't heard of it before!), at least i'd be getting in some drawing practice.
well, i have to say that i am amazed at the results even after just two weeks of very much part-time work on the exercises. i'm not quite halfway through the book yet, so i'll be interested to see where it goes from here. i'll illustrate my comments with examples of the exercises. i'm a long way from becoming the albrecht durer of the 21st century, but i'm rather pleased with the progress i've made so far.
to start with, edwards encourages readers to make a set of 'pre-instructional' drawings. basically, take a nice chunk of time, sit down and do the best job you can of a self-portrait, a portrait from memory and a drawing of your hand. i'm just including the hand one here as it has the best relationship to the examples which follow. i think you'll agree, it's pretty lame. not totally lame, but pretty lame (it's signed because the book told me to):
anyway, one of the first exercises in the book is an odd one - to copy a line drawing upside down. this is designed to get the left brain (which is the part which names stuff and says things like "a foot is this shape" which interfere with the way things like foreshortened feet need to be drawn in order to look realistic) to shut down - by drawing something upside down, it is apparently harder for the left brain to identify the bits ("oh this is a leg") and easier for the right brain to take over ("how far is that line from this? what's the angle between them"). i found this exercise pretty difficult, largely because i know the drawing used in the example intimately - it's a portrait of the composer igor stravinsky by picasso - so it was quite hard for me to not think of the various bits by their names, but i was fairly astounded at the results of the exercise. compare the following (my upside-down copy) with picasso's original...
the time between the first, "pre-instructional" hand drawing and this one was seven days. actually about 6 or 7 hours total drawing time, including my 2 1/2 hour class.
this is as far as i've gone with the book - hoping to get to do the negative spaces exercises tomorrow night and some more work over the weekend. however, i'm already finding a big difference in the work i'm doing in my class. we've now started on life drawing, and i'm pretty pleased with the results - after all, there's no way in the world that five weeks ago i could have drawn anything like this:
