Choices
I decided to enter some work into the Surface Gallery Postcard show and have been working on ideas for a couple of months now. I’m going to submit the ‘Caliban’ print that I prepared for Laine at the Leicester Print Workshop (see previous post). I also prepared a set of collagraphs at LPW and have been working on some monotypes over the holiday period.
Now I just have to choose three from the following set of nine.
Decision, decisions! I know, I’ll get wife & daughter to choose 
2011 in review
The following is an automated post…
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 3,900 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 3 trips to carry that many people.
iPad painting
Have got behind on my blog postings recently. There are two or three printmaking sessions I need to cover but, just to fill in, I thought I’d post a couple more iPad paintings. As before, these are done with the ArtRage app. I love the way it blends paint as in real painting. I’ve not painted in oils before so don’t know how accurate it is but the colour muddying produces some great effects.
First painting is an abstract from a seascape photograph I found somewhere and downloaded:
I like the blue/pink/yellow effect in the top half of the image and the rust effect on the lower right. The swirls in the bottom middle — taken from where, in the photograph, the sea washes against the pier — are less effective. The marks themselves don’t fit, they unbalance the mark making in the rest of the image. Might try erasing that part of the image and see if it is possible to repaint — like scraping back a real painting. Or, maybe just take the lessons forward and have another go at a similar image. I did do a second, darker, one but it was even worse. What would be useful in ArtRage is a notepad alongside each work where you can record thoughts as you go along.
Today, I wanted to mess around with more muddied colours, so had a go at the good old circle again — one only this time instead of a grid of them.
I really like this one. The brush marks, the textures, the blurring and muddying of the colours. I like the balance of the colours as well. Maybe I should stick to painting abstract circles 
I wonder how this would work as a collagraph. Hmm…
Life Drawing, weeks 3, 4 & 5
I still don’t ‘get’ life drawing. Yes, I know that ten hours is not going to make anyone proficient in anything. But, I seem to be struggling with drawing in itself. I don’t know if it is just that I find the struggle with proportion a little pointless in these days when a camera can capture it all for you instantaneously, after which you can simply take the photograph as a starting point for the actual art. Do I want to learn how to capture exactly what I see without any aid but my thumb? I’m more interested in translating what I see into what I want to represent but am bogged down in the basics. Maybe it is just that, at my age, I don’t really want to spend the next ten years learning the basics.
I still have one more five-session course and a weekend one early next year at Embrace Arts so we’ll see whether anything ‘clicks’. What I would like to learn from these courses is how to model form correctly. Maybe I should start practising this with still life compositions, but focusing on just parts of the composition without worrying about the whole. Maybe even start from photographs of a composition, line drawn on the iPad and printed and ruled up.
Anyway, back to the life drawing. Weeks 3 and 4 were pretty disastrous. We had a male model for those two weeks: I hope he never sees this post as he certainly wouldn’t recognise himself. I’m not great at drawing the female form but am really crap at the male form.
As always, 90% of my time is spent in just getting the proportions roughly right, so these are little better than line drawings. I was hoping to do better the next week, but no such luck! Diane had us try blue pastel on black paper for a change:
Can’t say that was a success. The last, longer, pose was a little more successful in terms of getting the proportions right.
but the problem is that the whole thing looks wrong with such a complicated pose without proper modelling of the forms. Aargghhh!
Week 5 saw our female model return. I still had to spend all too long on getting proportions right, but at least she looks (reasonably) human!
I think this last drawing is probably my most successful (phew!). I’d been able to capture some of the negative spaces correctly and was much better at sizing up using the head as the basis for all other measurements — something I’d not been able to do before.
Anyway, that is it for 2011 life drawing. I found a website with posed models and have created a couple of iPad line sketches from them. I may try, over the xmas break, to work on modelling form better. We’ll see.
