More Life Drawing

I'm continuing to work digitally in the Open Life Drawing Studio at Visual Arts Mississauga. I think it's really pushing me to improve my digital drawing and painting skills. A few examples from tonight's session, all done using SketchBook Pro and a Wacom tablet.

The Digital Life

I realize I haven't posted here for quite some time, but this seems like a good opportunity. I decided the time had come, and last night I took my computer and tablet to the Open Life Studio at Visual Arts Mississauga. Wow, was I ever pleased with both the results and the potential for the future.

It's a very different feel, working on a tablet with an active area of about 5 1/2" x 9" compared to an 18" x 24" pad on an easel. One of the advantages I was hoping for was to be able to do something more painterly in the longer last pose without the fuss of setting up painting materials and clean-up afterwards. It also meant a very easy switch between "tools," so I was able to move back and forth between pencil, marker, pen and wash. It made for a varied evening.

All of these examples were made using a Wacom Intuos Pro medium tablet and SketchBook Pro 6. Let me know in the comments what you think.

Figure Studies

I've really been enjoying the opportunities I've recently had to spend time drawing and painting from the figure. It's been quite a while since I spent any time in a figure class, and it's been great! Yesterday, for the first time in years, I got up the courage to take out the oils, and spent the afternoon with a bunch of friends making this small study. These are water miscible oils, as the studio in question doesn't allow solvents, and I like to have a thin, washy paint for the underdrawing. For the rest it's just paint straight from the tube and a tiny bit of oil to assist with flow.

This is small, 12x16, and it took me most of the 3 hour session to bring it to this stage. Overall, I'm very pleased with the visual quality, although it's not a particularly flattering portrait of the model. I'll be drawing her again at Visual Ats Mississauga's Open Studio life session on Thursday. These Thurdsay sessions have been extended through the spring, starting April 4th.

Below are some recent drawings from these sessions, done with carbon pencils and pastel pencils on toned paper.

Mixed Media

I've been considering trying to do something with oil pastels for a little while, and my friend Aleda O'Connor, who has worked with them for some time, was very encouraging. Much as I love Aleda's approach (and I urge you to check out her blog) I wanted to do something different with them.

Recently, with my acrylic landscapes, the surface texture of the painting has become more and more important to me, to the point where I now regularly texture my panels with various rough grounds and use thick paint where I can. I was hoping that using oil pastels over top of such an acrylic underpainting would yield some interesting results.

So, during a recent landscape class, I coated an acrylic underpainting with clear gesso and took the oil pastels to it. I was very pleased with the results.

I have also been looking for an approach to figure painting that would allow me a more expressive, gritty feel. I took an abandoned demo of a landscape underpainting and coated it with a pastel ground. I made a very rough, blocky carbon pencil drawing of a figure and overpainted thin acrylic washes to emphasize warm and cool areas, then went to town with the oil pastels. Again, I am very pleased with this little experiment, I think it shows a lot of promise.

Next, I'm going to try some still life or floral compositions, and see how those suit me. I may be on to my next obsession...

Digital Figure Study

I continue to play around with painting in Photoshop, and I finally have a figure study I'm not embarassed to share. This is actually the third version of this image. I decided that I really needed to push the colour and texture a little to create a little more interest in an otherwise monochromatic painting, so I banged in some greens, blues and purples and massaged them into the original warm oranges and browns. A lot of this is experimenting and playing with the various brushes and settings that are available in Photoshop. I think it has a bit of that trashy paperback/pulp look from the 50s and 60s. Kinda fun...

My Fall painting class has started, so there should be some posts of acrylic landscapes again soon. But I'm not giving up on the digital world!