Description
RAS sent an email out to its members about an upcoming Life Drawing Session hosted by Sue Sanders. Now life drawing is something I always wanted to do but let’s face it, having attended a Catholic Girls’ Secondary School there was no way a nude was ever getting within 1000 miles of our school, far less our art class. I think we drew enough fruit to stay healthy via osmosis!
Anyway, after school, life got hectic, art took a back seat to making money, yadda yadda… and now here we are. Finally, I can do a life drawing class. I’m 5 months pregnant which means I’ve got 4 months to squeeze in as much creative stuff as possible before the little miss arrives to claim my time.
So off I went, a bit nervous but very excited. Hopefully, the fact that I’d never done life drawing before wouldn’t make too much difference as Sue had explained that this was a drawing session, not a class.
It was fantastic! Perhaps I was just so hungry for any little creative experience, but I was so happy I went. When Sue announced the first 5 minute sketch, I swallowed hard. 5 minutes?
Then a vague memory of doing stuff similar to this in GCE Art came back. My old art teacher, Mrs Edwards used to make us do speed drawings of well… basically, the skeleton but using shapes, not bones. So a trapezoid for the hips, oval for the head, lines or very elongated ovals for the thighs, calves, upper and lower arms. Armed with this vague recollection, I dived in.
Admittedly, not every sketch was a winner but hey, I gotta start somewhere 🙂
As you can see from some of my Step 1 pics, my confidence (and ability to look around the room and see what other people were doing) grew with each sketch. I moved up from just pencils to charcoal, then I branched out into chalk pastels on black paper no less! This was a really great way to re-learn the form of the body. On my first try at life drawing, I think I got 2 out of 5 so I’m still winning! Things can only get better.
And they did!
I was already having a whale of a time when Sue set up the 20-minute sketch. Before I knew it, she called time. I looked down and really saw what I’d created.(See Process pics, Step 2) Wow! I think I impressed myself!
Then for the final drawing set, which was our model in pink lounging on her pillows.
I could feel my creative self grinning like a right plonker. When you haven’t created anything artistic for years, you start to think you’ve lost it. I had tried to design invitations a few months before this session and it was an epic fail! What used to take me 20 mins to do almost 10 years ago, now took 2 days. Urrgh! And the result was rubbish! So I was in 7th heaven with these sketches. Sue’s session was showing me that I still had it. I might be rusty but I was definitely still an artist.
Woohoo!
