Tuesday 26 November 2013

Life Drawing in St Ives

When I was down in St Ives recently, I went to life drawing classes at the St Ives School of Painting, which is always a huge pleasure.  The classes are held in the old Porthmeor Studios, which have been refurbished, but which were originally fisherman's net lofts.


You learn not only from your tutor, but through the model, the other students, and the energy created by the class.  A good life drawing class is where everybody is giving - model, students, tutor, setting -  and you put that all that energy into the drawing.

Luckily, we had a great model, and I thought it would be useful to show you the whole series of drawings (even the rubbish ones) so you can see all the drawings from a single class.  

These are mostly 10-minute poses, so you have little time to get down all the main information. It's all about the sense and weight of the pose, what it feels like, rather than detail, so it's very broad, expressive mark-making.  We're not talking HB pencils here.

I'll talk about the materials another time, but for now, here's the drawings.  They are all done on buff-coloured A1 sheets of paper (that's 8 x A4 size).  So they're big.

(The black shapes at the sides of some of the drawings are the clips holding them on to my board.)













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