Drawing Class 15th June

This is my latest 'pair' from my Drawing Class. Producing the final image in this blog involves rather more than just putting pencil to paper. I've just been reminded of all the challenges involved from walking into the studio to posting the image on the left.

To start with I made all sorts of mistakes when settling down to draw and after 20 minutes decided to ditch what I'd done and started again.

I'd positioned myself stupidly so that the sun was behind me and shining on to the paper which caused a frightful glare and all sorts of problems with my eyes when looking up to models and then back down to the paper. I also forgot to put in verticals and horizontals to start with - and ended up doing so much erasing and adjusting it just became simpler to start over.

I'm learning that when doing two models together it's much easier to get the proportions right if I put the background in and use it as part of the measuring process. Of course the fact that last night my view didn't contain a single true horizontal did not help!

I also had fun when we got to the photography and graphics phase. I photographed it

• in my kitchen in the usual place - it didn't like it and produced a warm side and a cold side
• on the floor with with white boards around it - still didn't like it - same distortion
  
• in front of the window with the good north light - it came out blue - but it was at least a consistent blue. This last photo is actually the basis of the one you can see after I sorted out the levels, the brightness, the contrast - you name it!
  
  

I'm just completely perplexed as to why photography is easy peasy some days and a complete nightmare on others when the lighting looks about the same! It's so much easier when I do the greyscale scan of the heads! (Hi John - another hatching one for you!)

Then after the photography problems came the cropping conundrem. The studio has new plinths and hence the models are now nearer together in reality and in size on the paper; but, for some reason, I drew them smaller than I needed to. So I decided to crop - and another set of decisions: what format; how big; whether to stick with the original composition or try and see if a crop produced a better one???. In the end I cropped down to the original composition and focus and didn't try to get 'clever'

Does anybody else ever have 'days' like this?

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