Cultural Days

Richmond Artists Guild planned our usual contribution to Cultural Days - which was September 30th-by having a model and the public could either watch or join in. We decided to have a bit of a twist by having our model pose on her motorcycle. One good thing was, when the model took a break to stretch and walk around, the motorcycle stayed put so some more work could still be done.Some were painting on canvases but I decided to work on pastels and I chose a neutral grey pastel paper. Pastel paper is two-sided. One side is smoother and the other side has more of a grid surface to hold the pastel pigment. Good quality pastels have more pigment than cheaper ones. Pastels come in soft, hard or even pencil forms. There are also very soft powdery ones that come in little cases much like the compacts girls used to carry to powder their noses. In fact, this form of pastel is applied with a sponge - and make-up sponges are cheaper than the ones sold for the same purpose in art stores. Pastels have to be kept sorted to like colours so that they don't rub off against each other and become grubby. One of the joys of using pastels is that the colours have a lush richness to them that can be a delight to apply. Well- it rained on our Cultural Day, but we were under a canopy and managed to finish- but I bet our model would have been happier indoors with a heater.

Latest Life Drawing

This was done in about two hours last night at Life Drawing

The pastel paper is a sort of smokey mauve colour - I think it is called "Twilight" or something like that. I drew lightly with a white Conte' crayon to work out proportions. This is actually the second drawing as the other - on the other side, I didn't like the results. Then I couldn't locate an eraser so  I just turned it over. Shortly after, I found *four* erasers - they had become so grubby from the pastels that they weren't recognizable. So now I have cleaned them up a bit - threw one out - and have them in their own little plastic "snack pack" to keep them cleaner. Of course, kneaded erases don't last forever anyway. Then I worked mostly with soft pastels - a little pan pastel in the lower left- and pastel pencils in a linear way- especially on the face. We do a "long pose" every two months and they are  mostly draped figures. Nice to have a longer time to get into it - and to work in colour.

Life Drawing today-

This is what I did at our Life Drawing session today. Then I made two decisions. One was to  sign and date my drawings that I'm currently keeping. The other decision was to make a new category for my Pinterest and have it just all drawings from Life Drawing - and just my own work on that one. Some of my cat paintings are on my "Cats" category but there are other cats too. I used a fairly dark brown pastel paper for this one and also used some soft pastels as well as my harder ones - and some of the powder ones that come in dishes too. This was about 2 and a half hours of work- maybe a little less- hard to figure out how long the breaks were. Upper left corner was a shadow on the paper when it was photographed. I felt it worked fairly well- lots of colours, lots of layering, I was almost going to do a drawing that was more profile and had rim lighting- but then I thought she had an interesting face so I wanted a better view of her face. I also liked the hand placement. I chose to cut off the lower body because I thought it made a better composition with the hands leading your eye back up the face and around again. Including the feet would have meant the head would be much smaller - and, it was the face that I found especially appealing so I didn't want it to be miniscule. I draw smaller, usually, on Wednesday nights so I needed to work larger again. I'll have to try to photograph my black and white pencil (on gray paper) drawings that I have been doing. Of course, they aren't as finished pieces since they are mostly only about 20-minute poses.

Back to pastels

This is from two weeks ago at Adrienne's with Shelley modelling. We have another session scheduled for tomorrow. I have a few pan pastels now. They are super-soft and applied with sponges. Make-up sponges work just fine. I find them very useful for a type of "underpainting". They fill the paper a bit and then other pastels can be worked over them - such as bringing in colour in the shadows. At Wednesday night Life Drawing, I was working in a new grey-toned sketchbook for the longer poses and drawing with black and white pencil crayons. I've also worked on a couple of acrylic paintings so I'm all over the board with various media- but that is part of the fun.

I think I'm getting the hang of Pinterest  - and just posted a new board with cat paintings and photos. However, I need to keep the art tools in action and not spend too much time at the keyboard.