Grasping Heads, Transforming Space and Frustration at The National Gallery
Drawing a Head provided some great breakthroughs this week with the help of Sharon Brindle, who helped me get my scale right and encouraged me to stick with very limited colour schemes throughout the day.
Gouache on Paper
One of the issues that became evident last week was that increasing scale sacrificed my drawing accuracy and presented more challenges to solve. I think this is why my line drawings last week worked so well, they were more towards a medium-size and I managed to capture the sitting posture of the model too.
Gouache on Paper
The painting above was probably the most successful of the day, Sharon discussed with me that what made it so effective was the use of the blank space around the model - it really emphasises the placement of the figure who sits very comfortably in the middle.
These final few are others I had dotted throughout the day. I do think that for Drawing a Head, this week seems to have had the largest success and I’m looking forward to bringing this progress into my oil painting.
Still Trying to Warm up to Coloured Pencils
The National Gallery was led by Mark Cazalet this week so my Medusa drawing is currently on hold. Still going in with my new coloured approach, I completed several different types of drawings throughout the day:
I realise that I work incredibly slowly at The National Gallery, and coloured pencils are partly the reason. Furthermore is the fact that what’s sitting in front of me most of the time is so incredibly rich and detailed that I get completely lost in it. After talking to Mark about getting too caught up, I loosened up for the afternoon session.
The afternoon certainly went better than the morning, but I’m still just not comfortable using coloured pencils. I just feel I have next to no control over colour and the texture frustrates me to no end - how can I study a painting without painterly materials???
Having fun with Perspective
Due to my ever-expanding list of notes-I-should’ve-took-down, I don’t have the name of the text we were reading this week for Drawing a Story - but I can tell you that it involved several short stories involving a blind man, an exterior shop, a woman reflecting by a window and a musician.
There’s a certain flatness in my work sometimes that pops up again and again, it’s something I’m trying to work to improve on so for the afternoon I played around with perspective and tried to create more dynamic spaces:
That’s it for this week, (I know I’m currently running behind whoops) but do sign up if you’re interested in another (more successful) attempt with oil pastels next week!
See ya soon,
Tomas
