Ruth was on Holidays #1

So I had time to play around with materials....
This one started with a pencil drawing on 18"x24" Canson 1557 drawing paper. I wasn't real happy with the drawing, so it seemed worth victimizing first :)
I first glued the paper using Golden soft gel medium to a similar sized cradled & gessoed birch panel, and then experimented using Golden high flow acrylics, in some places using their airbrush medium as a sort of resist. The effects of that are pretty interesting and (I think) exploring more.

Inverting the colors gives and interesting result as well, this I think might make a good poster...

Finally!

If you notice an improvement in the photos on this blog in the near future, thank Ruth. She's been doing a marvelous job getting photos up to date for work done over the last year. This in turn lets me produce much better prints, as well as much better pictures for posting. And it gives me much more time for drawing and painting.
Here's a few, all of which Ruth modeled for:

Moonrise: Acrylic and Conte on pastel paper, 65x50 cm.

Catching up....

Art has its own reasons:

Acrylic on Panel, 24"x48"

We are slowly catching up on photographing work - it's kind of hard to focus on that when the weather is so spectacular (it's not snowing!), and I would much rather be drawing or painting - but I guess it has to be done.

(more below)

Ruth

Whoa, it's been awhile. Not that I haven't been busy, though probably a little too distracted by reading. Want some suggestions? I've got lots, from Schopenhauer to my most recent find, The Singing Neanderthals.
Or Arts and Letters Daily (how much time do I waste there?!). Or (especially) b.o.a.t scribbles, thank goodness Avalon Moore only does one page a week, or I'd never get anything done....

Anyway, I've been working with The Artist Known as Ruth for on a prett5y regular basis since last fall. She's a good figurative artist in her own right, which means she brings a lot of artistic experience and background to modeling. I'm going to start putting up more work as I get caught up with the more boring aspects of studio practice - there's a rather large pile of drawings collected over the last while, ready to be edited and either tossed or photographed, as well as a couple of paintings. So I hope to get these up as soon as I can.

But in the meantime, some from last week. All are Conte on either Canson Mi-Teintes, or Fabriano Pastel paper; 50x65cm.

Ruth is very good at rather difficult poses:

(more after the break)

Hanna Bent Not Broken

Yesterday was a bit of a rough day drawing-wise, though not as bad as I thought. Perhaps salvageable! And today started out with some difficulty, but for a change improved as the session went on. Kind of like Nova Scotia weather...

We are currently working at creating another encaustic. We tried first working from her her feet, looking up (another failure), and then from her head - this one has possibilities. There's still a lot of fiddly things to do like reducing the curve on the upper back (but not so much that the raven tattoo gets lost), settling her face into the blankets, softening the robe, etc. But that's all probably best left to the painting stage.



There's a line down the drawing about 1/3 of the way in from the left. That's because I am used to working on 2x3 foot vertical drawings, and have trouble with horizontal formats. Can't think sideways! So I started with a vertical format, and thought I could leave out the legs & feet. But on the vertical format the drawing was just too incomplete, so we turned the support over and stuck the first drawing on the end, creating another foot for the feet.

But what to do about the background? Perhaps some verticals, and a raven.

Hanna, Post-Modern Olympia

Perhaps one of the greatest privileges of working with a single model over a period of time (we've been at this now for about two months) is the way it helps me see Hanna as a complex human being. One would think that drawing the same person repeatedly would make the task easier, and yet I find it harder; one becomes aware of the subtle shifts from self-possession to pensiveness, from inner certainty to the young poet who could write:

You never asked me to think of you, but I disobeyed.

(It's from one of my favourite poems of hers, written several years ago I think, but I haven't put it up yet).

Alas my eye is still quicker than the hand, but it slowly gets better.

The first of these was done last week; it's a retake of one we did about ten days ago, but I rather messed up the drawing. I really liked the pose, what with the arm resting on the cushions and the hand floating above the shoulder, and asked Hanna to repeat it. (She usually takes her own poses).



This one was done at the same time as the original for the one above. The photo seems fuzzy because the drawing was; by the time I got around to sharpening it I though better of doing so.



This last was a quick sketch, we had almost run out of time. Lots of drawing errors, but then again, there's nothing like a shortage time combined with tiredness to force one to loosen up a bit, and just focus on capturing a sense of what one sees. Which is maybe why I like it best.



All work is on 24"x36" Kraft paper, using Nupastel.

Clearing the decks from last year...

Both are conte on Kraft paser, approximately 2'x3'.
Faye:

Bill

Just down the street....

Just down the street (and in the same neighborhood in the blogosphere) is the studio of Joy and Brian Scott; good art, good woodworking, and right across the street, good coffee :)

Briana has taken the time to start up a reference blog for life drawing in the Halifax Dartmouth area - http://figuredrawingns.blogspot.com/ - and this is to thank her for her effort! Figure groups - except for a few that have been around for awhile - tend to come and go very quickly here, due to lack of space & financing (and of course a certain amount of internecine squabbling). So a few (Christmas) thanks to Briana for putting this together!