Still Sketching

The weekend was just too full for me to catch up on my blog posts. Friends to catch up with and more mundane tasks.

I have been sketching all the way through, some better than others. And one sketch was started on Monday but not finished until Thursday.

On Mondays I teach a Pilates class in the evening. Last Monday I arrived a bit early and began a sketch out of the window looking towards Bradford University and the city centre. Almost as soon as I had started, women from class began to arrive. I didn't get very far, just the foreground. However, I also teach a yoga class for older women in the same room on a Thursday, so I had half an hour or so to finish what I had started. I added the colour later.

Bradford Skyline

At the moment I'm experimenting with how much colour I put on sketches. I deliberately left the foreground uncoloured. I intend to play with more and less colour in future sketches.

Later on in the week, I did my usual session at Costa Coffee, and added some sketches from the pub as well.

Back at Costa

Down The Fighting Cock

And then on Friday, it was back to Hive in Shipley for another two hours of figure drawing for the Angel and Acrobats course. The model for Fridays session was Izzy again. We were doing a lot of quick, gestural sketches this week. I spent most of the session working in a sketchbook that is hard to scan, so I may try taking some photos if I have time this week. I did do one sketch on a piece of loose paper. This one was about looking for big shapes rather than outlines.

Izzy in Ink

And then we had some fun with an exercise that helps build teamwork as well as relieving some of the attachment we sometimes have to our artwork. Johnny, a student from Leeds Met University on work placement, kindly agreed to sit alongside Izzy for the last pose. For this exercise we worked in groups of three on two drawings. Using different coloured pastels, two people worked on the two drawings while one person observed. After a minute we all moved on one place, and kept moving each minute for about ten minutes. It was great fun, and all of the pairs of drawing had very different emotional content depending on the relationship of the two figures.

Izzy and Johnny

We finished the session with a ten minute play with some tin foil, making figures based on some of our gestural drawings from earlier.

Tin Foil Figures

(apologies for the photo quality)

Finally, on Sunday I had a play with a new fountain pen. I need to get some waterproof ink so I can put  colour washes over it without the ink flowing into it.

Black Cat on the Rug