Life Drawing

Early blogging today. I've been up a while and managed to wake up, but not before sleepily spilling half a glass of lemonade down my front while I was trying to have a drink. That'll shock you into having your senses about you, I find.

I'm fighting for time right now. There are so many things I want/need to do and it's all so pressing, but I can only do one at a time, which is vexing in the extreme. A common theme for me I know, so I won't go on, but I'll be busy as a demon today.

We've touched upon the topic of life drawing on the Folksy forum. It's never been mentioned before in the time I've been participating, so it's wonderful to see some examples. I'm of the opinion that there's nothing like it for honing drawing skills; it's such a difficult discipline and takes a massive amount of concentration and application. I don't go to classes any more for it, but I'm very fortunate to have a few willing models when the mood takes me to draw.

Here's one of mine, a study of foreshortening, one of the skills that I've always found ever so tricky to peg.

And another quite old one. Someone once looked at this and advised me to stay away from abstract painting because I'm clearly no good at it. It's not actually an abstract, it's a negative study with the reclining figure itself nestling within a very free ink depiction of the background. Maybe art school experiments are just a bit too much for some folks, or maybe it's just me, but I like this one a lot.