Author Archives:
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.
Caliban linocut
The artist in residence at Leicester Print Workshop, Laine Tomkinson, is working on a project around Shakespeare’s The Tempest. She asked members of LPW to contribute images printed from 6″x4″ linocuts. After dithering about whether someone at my level of expertise ought to contribute, I eventually took a piece of lino home to work on.
I had a number of thoughts about the tempest itself and then about the feast but, on reading through the play, was struck by the stage direction at the beginning of II.2: [Enter CALIBAN, with a burden of wood. A noise of thunder heard].
My study of Shakespeare at school predated the arrival of feminist, post-colonial, psychoanalytic, etc reading of texts. But I’d read a lot of such analyses since and decided to produce a more sympathetic image of Caliban than would normally issue from a straight reading of the play.
Caliban lives on an island on which Prospero, a European intellectual, and his daughter, Miranda, are marooned. Prospero promptly enslaves Caliban, forcing him to do his bidding using his ‘magical’ powers, torturing him if he disobeys. Most of this is explicitly stated, though with the explanation that such treatment is justified because Caliban is a savage (read, non-European).
I wanted to make an image that made this slavery explicit. I drew some ideas on the iPad using ArtRage (my main art program on the iPad now) based on images found on the internet and out of books. Since the final image would be b&w, I loaded ArtRage with a black canvas and drew using a white pen. I exported this image, printed it as 6×4 and then traced the image onto the linocut using Tracedown White. After a couple of proofing prints, I found the right pressure on the hydraulic press and left the block with Laine to work with.
I also printed one fair copy for myself on nice paper:
The cut has a few problems — the lines on the face are too fine to reproduce easily. The pressure has to be just right. And the mouth did not work properly — bit too big. But not too bad for my third or fourth linocut.
I’m thinking of placing this in the Surface Gallery Postcard Show next year, if I can think of two more images to produce. We’ll see if anyone thinks it is worth £15 
Life Drawing, weeks 1 & 2
Although my preference is more for abstract art than figurative, I still think it’s useful to be able to draw properly. After quite some effort, I can usually essay a reasonable likeness of what is in front of me, but am pretty dire at the human figure. So, I signed up to a couple of five week Life Drawing classes at Embrace Arts, the arts centre of the University of Leicester. The one that I am on now is ‘Life drawing: catching vitality‘ with tutor Diane Hall.
Week 1
I was somewhat nervous starting out. Mainly that my attempts would be ludicrous and everyone else would be producing much better work. I confided this in Diane beforehand and she reassured me that I was not the only beginner artist. I was still worried.
The class was a lot bigger than I thought it’d be – 16 of us, in all, plus one medical student doing an elective that involved attending the first few classes. The room was large enough to accommodate us all. 16 easels circling the centre where the model would pose.
We were asked to use charcoal for the first class. The model posed for half an hour as we tried to capture a likeness. I really floundered at this, trying over and over to get the proportions right. In the end, I had more erased than drawn. The model then took up the same pose after turning 90° to the left. I did better with this second pose although the upper body looks too narrow and the emphasis on the two legs is the wrong way around: at least this one looks like a human female!
After a break to give the model a rest (I don’t know how she does it), we started in on the third pose, again a quarter turn to the left. This one looks a little square and the lines are too same-ish. With the fourth drawing, I over compensated, I think, and made every line stand out. The proportions are better but the back leg doesn’t look as if it belongs to her. I gave up on trying to get the face right: I might have to resign myself to drawing people from the back! And with them wearing mittens and socks
I was quite pleased at the end of the evening. I had managed to produce some reasonable sketches in the time although I clearly had a long way to go. The worst part, though, was the screaming agony in my neck and shoulder. I’ve always had problems there and have learned to compensate by not holding my arm outstretched for too long. This does not work when you have a limited time to draw a pose. For the last drawing, I was holding and rubbing my right shoulder with my left hand while trying to draw and snatching my arm down every few seconds: the model must have thought me a real wuss.
Week 2
We began this week with the model walking around, moving her arms, changing body posture. I wasn’t at all sure what we were meant to do. The guys either side of me managed to draw poses out of the movement but I couldn’t even see how to do this. So, all I did was try to capture a few lines. Not a success. I don’t even think I got enough to turn it into an abstract and there really is no sense of movement there. We were given bundles of charcoal to use in drawing – three or four sticks taped together. I enjoyed using this: it produced some nicely textured lines.
After this session, the model held a pose for a short while. I used the bundle of sticks again for this drawing and tried to get a sense of dynamism into the drawing. I’m not sure I succeeded at that. It does look more ‘alive’ than those of the previous week with a better use of shading, and the proportions are better but the arm shapes don’t work and the legs are wrongly emphasised. Diane suggested that I needed to get more of a mixture of light and shade into the lines and I tried to take that on board for the final pose.
The last pose was a long one. She held it for about ten minus before the break and then the whole time after the break so we had plenty of time to work on our drawings. I did manage to get more variation into the lines this time, trying to thin the lines out where they were lighted and darken them where they were in shadow. I also made more use of shading, rubbing texture into the drawing with my fingers.
I know the drawing looks ‘wrong’ but, at the time, I couldn’t see how to fix it. Her right arm was bent inwards and tucked into her body with her weight leaning back on it and I feel I got the lines in the right place but the drawing doesn’t suggest that at all. It looks as though that arm is bent outwards and drawn badly. I didn’t get time to ask Diane how it might be made to look right – one of the problems of being in such a large class.
My neck and shoulder were in agony again. I’m going to have to find some strengthening exercises, some avoidance techniques or get a jab of cortisone before every class! Still, I was happy with what I’d produced and am looking forward to next week.
Introduction to Letterpress
I spent yesterday at a wonderfully enjoyable workshop – Introduction to Letterpress – run by Sat Kalsi at the Leicester Print Workshop. The day itself was very well organised and expertly run. Sat is a great teacher: knowledgeable, helpful and always encouraging. But she must have been exhausted by the end of the day.
We began with an introduction of how to set metal type using a composing stick. Sat had set out a number of type cases of different sizes, from 18pt to 36pt. I gravitated to an 18pt case as I had come prepared with some longish texts. I’d asked my wife and daughter for some texts that they might like set in addition to the Donne poem I was taking, The Sun Rising. Maggie chose Shakespeare‘s Sonnet 116 while Vick gave me some favourite extracts and poems.
It was obvious that I needed to choose the shortest piece to set and so began on the sonnet. Sat looked at the poem and recommended that I count the number of e’s and a’s in it to see if there was enough in the tray – there wasn’t, so she fetched me another tray, 18pt Garamond.
The composing stick has a sliding end which is set to the maximum length needed for the whole text, in multiples of 6pt, and is left there for the whole page. So, I first set the longest line of the sonnet, the line beginning ‘Whose worth’s unknown…’. This took a long time. The type was set out in an ‘Improved Double Case‘ (though a few of my letters were in slightly different places), so each letter was a matter of hunt and pick using the layout sheet provided. Unfortunately, a lot of the letters had been previously replaced in the wrong slots so I had to check each letter as I took it out.
It turned out I needed a 36pt line length. I wasn’t going to reset that line again so placed a spacer underneath it and began on the first line.
When one of us had enough lines ready to take off the stick, Sat showed us how to remove the lines from the stick and slide them onto the galley tray (a metal tray with raised edges). I did this in sets of four lines. The composing stick got incredibly heavy. It is held, resting on the left arm with the thumb of the left hand holding the last placed type in place. Since all the type is cast in lead, you can imagine what a six inch by 2 inch lump of lead feels like resting on your hand and arm all day long!
This is a shot of the first eight lines of the sonnet in the galley tray. Each line has spacers at the end so that the letters are held quite tight and magnets (very powerful magnets – they take quite some effort to shift).
After the lines are taken off the composing stick onto the press, a proof is taken to check for mistakes. Sat rolled out some black ink (the same as for linocuts and other relief printing work) and showed us how to roll it onto the type. The whole galley tray is then taken to the Galley Press (a simple roller on guides) and a proof taken. Any mistakes then have to be corrected. This was not easy for someone with my clumsy fingers – I could have done with a pair of tweezers but I guess they aren’t used as they’d damage the lead type. Luckily, as my tray had so many letters in the wrong place, I’d been closely checking my work as I went along so only had about four mistakes in the whole text, e.g.:
By the time I’d set the whole poem, my back was killing me. Standing up, leaning over a desk all day is not fun. I’d got used to hunting out the letters so was able to sit down towards the end, but was still very sore.
Sat hunted out a nice gothic-style face, 18pt Light English Text, for me to use on the title for the poem and I set that and proofed it.
Setting such a longish text took me a long time. Others on the workshop set more sensible length texts and were able to do more than one. A couple of people moved on to setting wooden type to make sizeable posters. Another woman had brought some paper onto which she had painted a few colours and printed onto that – it looked great.
After checking the proof, I transferred the text to a chase – a heavy metal frame which takes your text block and uses quoins and other furniture to lock it into place in a much more stable way than with the magnets in the galley tray. I then used this on the Britannia Press to print onto stock paper:
This is my second-best printing. The best one went to Maggie.
I’d like to thank Sat for all the help she gave me during the workshop. It was a fantastic day and I’m very pleased with the amount I learned and with the printed results.
