Drawing Tuesday - statues, vases, jugs/pitchers

A nice straightforward topic, with lots of choices and scope. No explanation needed, or wanted, no doubt!

From Janet K - A sculpture by our friend John Cobb. The interior has lots of detail.

From Najlaa - This vase called Manhattan by Royal Winton.

From Sue K -  a copper tea urn which emerged every Christmas at home, along with mince pies, when guests descended.

From Gill -  chose to add three small jugs to an old drawing in my sketchbook just to challenge myself. 

From Richard - Well I might have a shiny new paint-box of 24 colours, but I'm having trouble choosing the right ones!

From Mags - I went out early for the first walk in over a week and gathered a 'posy' of brambles to draw tomorrow. I drew my little blue vase ( actually an eyebath) that I've had since a child using different media then realised I also drew it for ' glasses' theme in September ! Feels like Groundhog Day ( I blame the snow)..... 

From Judith - One small vase repeated. 

From Janet B - A couple of jugs. I’m so enjoying drawing at the moment 

From Ann - An African statue which I drew a few weeks ago 

From Jo - At the top, "?very old" - with raised decoration; below, Booth's parrot ware.

From me - Following on from an online paper cutting session, I used a variant of the method shown, applied to a printout of  shelves cluttered with jugs etc found in a 1997 issue of World of Interiors. The idea was to cut away some areas and leave others. Two printouts of different scales and a colourful magazine page were layered up, held together with tape, and cut all at once, then the "frames" and the outlines and jugs interchanged.

Drawing Tuesday - juxtaposition

Quite simply, juxtaposition is: " the fact of two things being seen or placed close together with contrasting effect.  " (Simply explained, with an art example. at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRyo0bMRx20&ab_channel=Philinthecircle in half a minute.)

"Two things" - ah, what sort of things? Objects probably; media, or techniques, too - scale, tone, etc, or are those opposites simply a matter of "contrast" per se?. 

Can more than two things be placed close together "with contrasting effect" - ? Or is the attempt to do so  what makes some collages look so muddled? 

The interesting thing is that the "contrasting effect" is what adds another dimension to the image, eg -

Some more examples from Instagram - 

and in 3D (this is about 6 feet tall) -

The possibilities are endless....

From Carol -  Flowers in the snow – not often seen in London. Pencils, pen and gouache – quite tricky but fun.

From Ann - A surreal image..using drawing of own hand and life study.

From Richard - a photo of textures/materials: bubble wrap (shall I tape this to that draughty window next?) + black quarry tile + plastic packaging foam. Then a cropped version. New Town murals from the 1960s?

From Judith - Juxtapositions with previous sketches

An Old General Store

Olive tree

From photo of three beavers I couldn’t resist

From Sue K - Here is my juxtaposing of shoe tree/shoehorn & brush. Interesting shapes which look rather like a horse chomping on straw! 

From Joyce - an unfinished slave sculpture by Michelangelo which I sketched at the Academia in Florence 2002. I have dressed him in Crystal Palace’s strip.

From Mags - Took some photos in the snow yesterday when I went to post an important letter. Today I've been having a fine ( if messy) time drawing from them with ink and cola pen on a variety of papers. Rosehips on a Colour Catcher and Tracks on Abaca tissue ( liking the interaction of marks when folded and scanned )

From Gill - white card on bronze paper -

From Janet K - Last summer the willows in the park in front of us were given a serious haircut. Planted in 1956 the willows  have been losing large branches in recent wind storms. The tree trunks are very sculptural which you don't see hidden beneath the leaves. The street lamp helped to match up the 2 photos I had taken.

From Najlaa - from yesterday's newspaper

From Sue M - my collage of two juxtaposed objects I loved the boy’s expression

From Janet B - two drawings taken from favourite photos. A highlight of my island walking tour, which several of you have done and you all have an open invitation to do once lockdown is over, is seeing the sheep in Mudchute farm and the incongruous background of Canary Wharf. The second photo, taken 15 years ago on a beach in Hong Kong, is of my son leaning against a tree. 

From me - Freedom vs restraint, spontaneity vs endless tweaking. On the left, a shape emerged from some blots of ink caused by wiping out a brush - a few lines with the inky brush currently in my hand, and the ample figure enjoys the sun on her face and the wind in her hair. On the right, after three weeks of trials and erasures and redrafting: I hope this is the final version of the kokeshi-doll figures, and their clothing designs, for the "children's day" woodblock print that is this term's mokuhanga project. Some of the drawing is a rubbing from the already-cut board, some is "colouring in" to get a sense of what the large figure's design will look like when the lines are cut away. 

Drawing Tuesday - shadows

 Some thoughts on shadows....

Shadow puppets - eg from Indonesia - or made with hands - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uv-MdaBfk8U&ab_channel=OneHowto

"Shadow of the photographer" - one of my woodblock colleagues used this idea last term - https://www.morleygallery.com/shadows-veronica-howard

The entire class used the "shadows" theme - it's no surprise that our (online only) exhibition is about shadows (though some are actually reflections, oops!) - https://www.morleygallery.com/shadows

Consider the interplay of shadows on 3D shapes -

And I liked these, snapped a few weeks ago, before the wall was clumsily graffiti'd  - both in shadow and making shadows -

Something as simple as cut paper can make dramatic shadows - consider these little cut triangles, strongly lit -

Silhouettes are shadows of a sort. Have you seen the wonderful animated films made in the 1920s by Lotte Reiniger? This film from the 1940s shows how they were made - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-TJvNBO1fw&ab_channel=TheMet (17 minutes). The first one, Prince Achmed, took her three years.

Some of us probably have sketchbook pages showing shelves of museum objects - and their shadows.

Cornelia Parker's recent work includes shadows of cut glass - https://cristearoberts.com/exhibitions/221/ - in the video (5 mins) she uses the phrase "where the light fell" and was blocked out by the different objects, which suddenly made me wonder "just what is a shadow, anyway"?

The impressionists famously used colour in their shadows. Have a look - https://www.liveabout.com/impressionist-techniques-what-colors-are-shadows-2578052

"Restless violet" is their official colour, apparently (https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/restless-violet-shadows)

Some good images in this brief history of shadows in art history - https://blog.oup.com/2017/11/shadows-visual-arts-timeline/ - including Peter Pan's famous shadow...

From Gill - My daughter requested these as a present and I thought they resembled antique hospital bed pans for gentlemen. However I rather like them now and I like shapes of the shadows they cast.

From Mags - Drawing around the shadows cast by my 'humbug' pincushion was a prickly operation...

From  Carol - Simply me and a tree.

From Judith - Two watercolour attempts and my 2019 Christmas card, knitted wire echinacea and shadow

From Janet K - Alexander Calder wire sculptures at Tate Modern. I was fascinated by how the shadows change from the shape of the sculpture.

From Sue K - Here’s my shadow seen from a tall tower in Cadiz in 2019. Loved the shapes but no sketching kit on board - now’s the time!

From Ann - here are a few shadows from my wanderings in Highgate woods.

From Najlaa - This picture was taken in the summer when a red car was parked outside my house and the sunlight reflected the colour through the net.

From Joyce -  this was drawn at Tate Britain , I think it was the same day as Margaret’s post, I remember it as a sunny breezy day , May 2018. Pen and ink and a grey felt tip pen.

From Richard - No strong light to respond to yesterday/today so I wondered what to do. On holiday a couple of years ago Sue and I went sketching together. I soon abandoned my sketch - very poor, wrong frame of mind.... This has nagged at me ever since so I've photocopied a digital photo of the view - centred on Sue doing a good sketch - and worked from that. 

From Janet B - Tulips. I had to cheat a bit and create a dramatic shadow with a strong overhead light but then I had a really relaxing and enjoyable afternoon listening to a talking book and drawing. Next time I’ll know to do any 2B stuff last as what look like secondary shadows in the photo are actually smudges which I can’t rub out. 

From Sue B - the wondrous shadows from a snap that i took in the courtyard of a museum in florence in 2019 …those renaissance architects and stone-smiths were so clever!!

From me - my offering is from several years ago, when a breezy Tuesday in the garden at Tate Britain found me sitting on a marble seat near the hazel hedge and looking at the shadows of the leaves, then getting out the sketchbook and a very small collection of inktense pencils, and spending most of the morning tracing the shadows. Of course they moved in the wind and the position of the sun moved too, and I had to make it up as I went along -- it looks nothing like a hazel hedge, nor was it meant to! The water brush was also used.

It's "about" ... being in the moment, enjoying the moment ...