Drawing day

The art foundation course at City Lit is arranged to have two intakes a year - the September lot have a term off while the January lot start. (Everyone attends in the April-July term, and the subsequent two terms.) For each intake, there are two groups, a Tues-Weds group and a Weds-Fri group. On Weds the two groups meet - and the room gets crowded.

On the first day of the "drawing" course, the subject was bags.

First exercise was to cover the centre of the paper with a sheet of newsprint, and draw underneath - without looking at the drawing - for 10 minutes. Very liberating!! Also this introduced the concept of "the performance of drawing" - keeping going longer than you want to ...

After these intense 10 minutes we turned the easels round into the centre of the room and walked around looking at everyone's work. Interesting results!

There was such a forest of easels that there had to be a satellite table for some of the group -

Next exercise involved using different media for 10 minutes each - keeping going for that length of time, and making different kinds of lines.

My first choice, among the pencil crayons, was the light brown - using flowing lines. Then, felt tip (grey) using angular lines, "drawing from the bone". Everyone got a thicker black felt tip and we were told to use curved lines. Then came the (red) ink, and we could use any sort of line - this is where I struggled.

The bag on the right started as a series of dabs with the end of the brush, which took about 3 minutes. What to do for the rest of the time? Also, this "sketchbook page" was looking unbalanced, so I put in the red bag on the left, this time really loading the brush with ink. The lines flowed on in a different way than the scruffy dabs on the other bag, and the excess ink pooled within the lines. Yes! - leave well enough alone ... still 4 long minutes to go ... back to the first bag, going over the lines with a loaded brush - eek a drip, so messy - no, "go with the flow", let's have more of those drips -- they were surprisingly hard to engineer.

The final 10 mins were for "adding anything you want" - so I had a closer look at the actual bag I'd quickly drawn on the bottom, and found that its blackness was made up of at least half a dozen different textures. You can use up a lot of time adding textures ...

Out on the street, the bird continues to perch in its tree -