Contemporary Realistic Drawing Blog Week 4 The wild weather has sent us slightly dotty. Or that could be the thousands upon thousands of tiny dots making up our marvellous drawings. Using pen and pointillism we took our inspiration from the autumn leaves and stones, with a focus on tone and form. The results speak for themselves! Everyone’s work was meticulous, detailed, and very effective. And we were all feeling a little less dotty by the end of the night with the repetitive process being like a meditation.
Week 3 blog Taking inspiration from nature - the randomness, texture and form of sticks and stones was the focus of tonight’s class. Mark making was key – we scribbled and stippled to represent the undulating and textured surfaces of the natural objects. The irregular character of natural object means we can be a little more creative with how we draw them, and it can be a little more forgiving if we are less accurate with our representation. However, it is also this variableness that makes these object so beautiful and fun to draw, with everyone’s own visual language was able to developing further into their own style.
Back to the drawing board! (I might just make that joke every week… sorry). Continuing on with the techniques we learnt last week, with the ‘softly softly’ approach to draw shapes and apply areas of tonal variation seen in the subject, which this week again was scrap paper (anything can be beautiful!). This week we had the added fun of attempting to achieve accurate scale by measuring the subject. This, in itself is an art, and takes time to master. It’s so satisfying for me and for the students to see progress so early on, and not just with their drawing skills, but their ‘looking’ skills – knowing why things might not look right, or differentiating between subtle variations in tone.
This month the lovely MaryAnne was in charge of the life printing session at The Safari Lounge. Here are a few of the pictures. Next months session is on the 6 November and you can book here
Here is a blast from the past for #throwbackthursday. These drawings are from one of the very first workshops which Look and Draw ran back in 2012. Inspired by the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci the day was spent working energetically and gesturally from the figure with charcaol, conte and red sanguine. Did you know that in his lifetime Leonardo filled over 13,000 pages of his journals with notes and drawings. He would draw his subject matter over and over from different viewpoints and perspectives. His journals were crammed full of gestural drawings and if someone of interest caught his attention he would often follow them around all day sketching them going about their daily business. “Kee
