Life Drawing from the past year.

As usual, life drawing is something I always like to keep working at.  I think it's especially important for teachers of art to keep life drawing.

Many artists will say that because they are not involved in representational art that they don't need to work from life, well if that's the case don't listen to any of their objective criticisms.

If those artists cannot prove that they have spatial awareness and knowledge of proportion, then all they have for you are opinions that could equally have come from someone of no training.  Should a journeyman tradesperson listen to the criticisms of a lackey?

On a base level it's possible for a lackey to observe that something has been well made, and that is equally true of art.  It's good to hear criticisms, but for any technical observations and the suitability of certain media to express ideas, those should fall upon deaf ears.

Too often, and increasingly, student artists are being 'taught' by those who have no knowledge of the life room or critical aspects of art.  This would be fine if the world of art was exclusively the domain of conceptual artists, however this is not the case. 

A good training in all the fundamentals of art is needed, I despair when I learn that artists who last set foot in the life room decades ago, if at all, are teaching in the life room.  Likewise, it's equally wrong for an artist whose skills are the primary domain of the life room to solely teach conceptual art. 

It may seem I have a chip on my shoulder, I do.  The world of art is something I have dedicated my life to, I hate to see the quality of our education eroded by 'bean counters' and 'paper pushers' who are cutting costs with little care for students.


Below are some of my favourite drawings that I produced from life over the past year.

Compressed Charcoal, prolonged gesture drawing.

Quick tonal study, charcoal and compressed charcoal

 Conté crayon

Pastel

Conté crayon

Charcoal and conté crayon

 Charcoal gesture drawing

Sepia chalk

Charcoal and conté on toned paper

If you are a disillusioned art student, try reading 'Letters to a Young Poet' by Rainer Maria Rilke.  It's a book with particularly poignant observations for the student of creativity, It helped me ground some of my thoughts about art while I was a student. 


Thank you for reading.  Please check back soon. 

If you are interested in my work, please take a look at my website, or my facebook page.  Thanks again.

Barry. 

Dragon Sculpture

So, I really admire the work of the Shiflett Brothers, google them because their work is incredible! I thought I'd like to try something similar, and so went about researching the materials and techniques that I would need to create a piece of sculpture in the style of these amazing artists.

I should mention, that I've not finished the sculpture. Typically, life gets in the way. I do really want to carry on with it because it's great fun!

First I started work on the armature, then later using wire attached it to an MDF board with a bolt, secured by a nut and washer. I found this a little inadequate, so if you're doing something similar make sure your armature is sturdy, I've tried various times to pad mine out. I found some artists using pieces of pipe, and next time I'll try that. Unfortunately I couldn't find a proper attachment to use a pipe from the local B 'n' Q.


Next, I fleshed out the skeleton by using more wire and milliput, I've researched that many artists in the States use plumbers putty, which is impregnated with metal for this...though I don't think it's available here in the UK. If you know of a better substitute, please let me know, apparently milliput is resistant to baking but it's not entirely heat resistant. So, when I get round to baking the sculpture it could be a mistake waiting to happen.

For the wings I went on to attach mesh around the skeletal structure of the wings. The mesh should make a good base for the sculpey to stick to.



I should point out, that in order for the sculpey to stick to some of the metal wire, I took the precaution of creating a 'tooth' by rubbing the surface with a small model maker's file.

Using the sculpey you can see I've started to pad out the muscle structure of the dragon. The sculpey I'm using is the pink stuff, I find it's a little too malleable for me at the moment. I read that some artists mix it with the firm sculpey (grey) to get a good consistency, so in the future I will probably buy an old pasta roller to try that.

This is a close up of the work I'm doing on the face of the dragon. I will need to make the structure a little more girthy. Here  I'm using the firm sculpey on parts of the sculpture that I want to remain sharp looking so the detail is retained.

At the bottom of the picture, you can see the bolts that I've used to attach my sculpt to a board. I found that while I was trying to model the detail, the sculpture would move on the wire, and when I tried to hold it, I would smudge some of the detail. This is a learning process, however!

You can also see that I started to pad out the wings with the firm sculpey, I'll create and add textures later.



I thought I would also attach the dragon to a base, I did a little sketch where the best solution appeared to be perching the dragon on top of a ruined tower. So, after making little bricks out of tinfoil, and scrunching up the basic form of a landscape, I started to cover it in sculpey. Below is the progress so far on the base.


Well, that's the progress I've made. I hope that in the year ahead I'm able to find the time to make more progress. Keep checking back to see how it goes...