Had an interesting life drawing session yesterday at 10 Feet Tall. It was a 'suggest a theme' session where people posted what they would like to see on the FB page and the model did his interpretation of the suggestions. This included wearing a morph suit, pressing and wrapping himself in cling film, posing in a druids robe and then to appease the purists a few standard poses.
I think everybody struggled with the wrapped in cling film pose, it was one of those things that would have been really interesting if you could spend several hours on it, as it was we only had 15/20 mins (I really must remember to put times next to the drawings!) I wasn't too displeased with my attempt, using charcoal helped as i could lay down tone and then pick out highlights.
I've recently come back to charcoal after a long old while, we never really got on but it's something I've always wanted to get better with as you can get such a good atmosphere with the stuff. That and it's fun to get messy sometimes (I imagine it would be quite painful to try with a pencil!) I did a few studies from photo ref before leaving just to get back in the swing of things, I've posted it along with the results of the session which I can bear to show! (hint: it's the female one)
OK so had a bit of a disaster on Thursday when my hard drive failed, lost pretty much everything and me being utterly stupid I hadn't backed up any of my recent work... just disappeared into the ether with little hope of recovery (have you seen the price of data recovery?!) So after briefly weeping for my lost data I set about picking up the pieces. Bought a new hard drive, reinstalled windows and all my programs and got back to work... life goes on.
One piece of recent work I was able to recover was on my girlfriends usb stick from where we'd got it printed.
So in memory of my fallen hard drive I present ' The Old Gods - Pilgrimage' conceived several years ago after a binge of documentaries about South America this was lying semi finished for about 2 years until I completed it recently. This was the last piece of work to be finished on my old hard drive.
Goodbye old friend, you shall be missed...
Having worked digitally almost exclusively for the past 2 years I thought it would be good to get back to my traditional roots. To this end I ushered in the new year with a spree of acrylic paintings. These were given as gifts to various family and friends for their birthdays or long overdue promises (lovely sentiment or cheapskate solution - you decide!)
I confess I'd forgotten how much I enjoy the tactile joy of working with physical medium, the push and pull of manipulating paint on canvas. This combined with the gut wrenching fear of fucking things up and the surprise of happy accidents has made this an interesting foray back into the wilds of traditional media.
This experience forced my hand into practicing techniques I have read about but are easily worked around in digital painting (painting fog is so much easier in photoshop!) and this is already feeding back into my digital work. I have found a new reverence for those old masters who could use such a fickle, indefinite medium to create works of such subtlety and elegance.
Enough pontificating, in no particular order here's the paintings...
Welcome everybody to my Art Hole!
This is my latest attempt at an art blog where I will be dumping (pun tentatively intended) my artistic misadventures. The last few blogs I started have fallen into grim silence after being starved of input, I will try to not let this happen this time. I am going to do my best to keep this updated at least weekly, more of a personal challenge than anything else!
Here's some life drawing from the past few weeks to kick things off. I go to the weekly sessions at 10 Feet Tall in Cardiff every Tuesday so at the very least I will try and post the results here every week.
(Although if I have a bad week I might leave it!)
Please forgive my crappy scanning!
