Life Drawing

The following Tuesday we had a life drawing session with Andrea which I really enjoyed! I love being able to draw the human form from real life and gain this experience. Today we used a variety of materials, including stick and ink, graphite with linseed oil and pastels, and produced some layered material images.

Stick and Ink Drawing, layered with Graphite and Linseed Oil

Coloured Pastel Tonal Drawing, Defined with Stick and Ink Contours

Stick and Ink, Graphite and Linseed Oil Drawing

I really enjoy the life drawing as I am really interested in the human figure's representation in art. My favourite material that we used today was the Graphite smudged using the Linseed Oil and it produced some rich tonal marks. I also spent most of the day drawing with my left hand (not my dominant right hand) as i love producing some less structured marks, as you have less control over your mark making and sometimes I feel these produce better marks.

Still Life

This still life piece was set up for us to work from during a painting session with Laura. We were told to paint a black and white tonal painting, using white oil paint, and a black colour consisting of a mixture of cobalt blue and burnt umber oil.


I drew out the basic shape with charcoal and then got to work identifying the darkest areas first, and then taking the darkest black I made from the two colour mixture, added small amounts of the white to produce the shade lighter...and so forth.
Here is the piece i produced from this angle....

I wanted to leave the background quite minimal as i wanted to keep the attention drawn to the 'figure' and also because I tailored my painting to have a drawn aspect to it by going over with the charcoal after I had defined the tone using the paints.