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 ...

Mornings in the studio

If the sun shines, there are shadows slanting across the worktable. Some are easier to catch than others! 

The white eggs make a change from having brown eggs, not that it makes a difference to the egg inside the shells -

I thought the white ones looked a bit crowded - social distancing, you know -

Ah, that's better

 Taking the opportunity to clear just a few inches of shelves -

Before - the discoveries behind the scissors pot

Souvenirs of the Designer-Makers degree show at Camberwell, a few years back

Old notebooks and sketchbooks - the tree is from the 1970s

Drawing by young Tom at a lunchtime concert in Oxford, 1982

From different eras: a favourite postcard and a wine label

After - just a bit more spacious

My inspiration - she likes to know how things work, and then get them to work, but she doesn't quite have enough manual dexterity and strength yet. But she's showing strong signs of perseverance; some would call it stubborness -

More morning moments -

There's time for doodling

Double doings - painting and shadow

Just a timely coincidence

 More discoveries -

Diversity, for a reason

2008, art foundation course - I used a drawing done at the National Gallery
from a Piero Longhi painting for a printing plate. Still like it, but the others are in the bin

Studio Saturday - catching shadows

Three weeks have passed since the previous update and projects have progressed. Painting the shadows of the pencils on the window ledge got me into a routine of getting up early, taking a cup of coffee into the studio, and getting going with something or other. 

At an angle?

As the sun [earth, actually] moves and the shadows move, the colours change

With pen (worth a try!)

The first grouping

 

Closeup, showing changes in colour for each new layer

Found a good space on the wall

The blobs are an accident, and so is the running paint -
and they interact somehow

First layer; I hold a hairdryer in my left hand and mix
the next colour of paint with the right hand, by which
time the shadow has moved enough for the next layer of paint

Paint vs Pen

The more the merrier

At the top, painting on washed-off version

These two were washed off too - but in the photo I see
a strange beast, a plumed deer perhaps

Laid out in chronological order; the final one is still
to be painted, on the next sunny morning

What have I learned? 

1. Keep it simple, no need to tilt the paper, for instance. It's ok to do the same thing time after time, because each time will be different.

2. Accumulation is good. You could even say that it's enough. After a while the whole gets to be more than the sum of the parts.

3. An end-in-view isn't necessary, an important part of the process is seeing what develops.

Once that final paper is painted, is this finished? I have no more paper - these were about to be binned, they've been hanging around since the late 80s. I like the faded vintage-ness. It gives resonance, I think, that they are proofs or over-run from the printing of the Royal College of Art's cookbook (1988), bought for mere pence at an RCA degree show. I never did make any of the recipes that are printed and illustrated on the reverse of these, but another (now lost) lives on in that Gunpowder Cake is one of my signature dishes.