More life drawing

Here are some from last week's class:

 Pencil, A3, 25 min

 Charcoal and white pastel, A3, 25 min

Pencil, A3, 15 min

For the next session we're having two poses of an hour each, and I've been asked to think about trying something different from pencil or charcoal... I have ideas, so watch this space...

Baby James

Hello!

Here's a quick portrait I completed the other night, while sitting in front of a lovely roaring fire. I couldn't bring myself to leave the room and head up to my 'studio', so I brought all my stuff down and enjoyed the painting and the fire at the same time :-)

I'm never too sure about pastels - I always seem to go a bit mad with the colours (maybe I need to invest in a better range of colours), and I tend to overblend them, but maybe that's something you can get away with when the subject's such a cute baby (I am biased, this is my nephew!). But it's nice to have a change of medium every now and again.

Various pastels on pastelmat paper, 8 " by 8" ish (cropped from a bit bigger, 9 by 12ish).

Edit: I've replaced the pic with one that's a bit more true to the original (the first pic I uploaded look rather orange!)

Painting outside, kind of

Hello again

One of my art goals for this year is to give landscape painting one last go, and see if I can muster any enthusiasm for it by painting outside, from life, rather than from photo refs. As it happened, the December/January Year of Painting challenge on the Painting Friends forum was to either set up a still life, or paint en plein air. I decided to go for it, despite it being the middle of winter and thus rather cold, windy and wet... in the end I actually painted from the relative comfort of my car...

First off, here's the painting. It's acrylic 12" by 8". I was painting for about an hour or so.

 

Here's a pic of what I was looking at - it's the village cricket team's pavilion, and the cricket field beyond:

And here's my set up - I had the pochade box on my lap. Just about enough room!

I have to say that I enjoyed the experience, so maybe there's hope for me and landscape painting yet. I'll have to get a portable easel if I want to actually paint outside the car one day - if anyone has any recommendations, let me know. Not the greatest painting ever, but I was pleased enough with it for a first outdoor attempt! Roll on the warmer weather!

Mad hair day

Hello!

Well, I decided to try a painting based on a sketch of my other half (see earlier post) and this is what I've ended up with :-)

12" square, acrylics on canvas. Not sure I'm completely finished with it yet. I'll leave it in a corner for a few days to decide whether anything annoys me too much, or if I want to do anything else with it...

Life drawing

Hello again:-)

Life drawing classes have started up again. Here's the best of the bunch from the other night.

 I seemed to be having a tiny feet problem with this one! This was the first of the evening, and I was feeling a bit rusty.

This one's a bit better I think. Still need to work on faces, hands, feet, the usual bugbears in life drawing I reckon!

Both 25-minute poses in pencil.

I may have overdone the hair...

Hello again!

In an effort to up my rate of sketching and drawing I've been doing some sketches from photo refs, working from the computer monitor, and here's one of them. Not a great picture I have to say, it looks a little distorted, but you get the idea!

A4 sketchbook, black kuretake sketching pen and grey tombow brush pen.

These are fun to do, and I was pleased with this one, from a fairly unpromising snapshot. Sketching in pen also means that I don't go back and fiddle (too much...)

Sketching from life

Hello!

Here are a few quick sketches, done over the festive season, to get me set up for (hopefully) a year of lots of sketching...

These were all done in an A4 size sketchbook, with a Kuretake sketching pen and, variously, a watercolour wash and a tombow brush pen. This is my long-suffering other half, trying to concentrate on puzzles in the newspaper...