What a week-end!
I spent this week-end at Arthog, a centre in North Wales that our county uses for school residential courses. Normally you have to take children, but luckily this was a Continuous Professional Development course - drawing.
I don't think I have ever been thrown in at the deep end quite so much - ever, ever! We were drawing first with charcoal, a medium I have never been taught to use, in fact I have never been taught to draw apart form a few lessons on how to work out the lines that you need to draw a street scene! Well, our subject was a very lithe naked woman, she sat, stood, stretched out, was squashed in a box, dressed in a tube of butter muslin, then for the last sessions reclined on a sofa. That was my first experience - a real live naked model. Then we had to use an easel - one of those real ones, that in itself is an art, because they can be vicious and collapse on you at every opportunity!
Our guest artist was wonderful, he showed us how to use charcoal. Not in the way I have used it with my classes - that as I now see is limiting. Then we rubbed everything out until there was the barest of outlines left on the page, fixed it with the artist's equivalent of hair spray and started again. We had to build up five layers to make a picture. Forewarned is forearmed you might think? Oh no, who forgot to leave enough space for her head? I forgot her boobs in one picture, hastily adding them towards the end of the time, only to see that they looked as if they had been transplanted in the wrong place altogether! Another sketch gave her an enromous boil like extension to her bum. Thankfully she did not take this personally!
After a lovely stroll down by the Mawddach estuary we went back to work in oils. Aaargh, by this time I really felt out of my depth. The others were mostly secondary art teachers and could draw; of the few primary staff, my skills were the least evident! But I had fun. The oils were quite an experience, we had to dab bits of colour. No filling in the marrows as he said, so dab it! Well I dabbed so well they called me Mrs Matisse, do you imagine that is good or bad?
I have an oil painting of mine which is going to be finished and hung on my walls, I might even hang the headless nude in charcoal too. It was fantastic and I wanna learn to draw!!!
I don't think I have ever been thrown in at the deep end quite so much - ever, ever! We were drawing first with charcoal, a medium I have never been taught to use, in fact I have never been taught to draw apart form a few lessons on how to work out the lines that you need to draw a street scene! Well, our subject was a very lithe naked woman, she sat, stood, stretched out, was squashed in a box, dressed in a tube of butter muslin, then for the last sessions reclined on a sofa. That was my first experience - a real live naked model. Then we had to use an easel - one of those real ones, that in itself is an art, because they can be vicious and collapse on you at every opportunity!
Our guest artist was wonderful, he showed us how to use charcoal. Not in the way I have used it with my classes - that as I now see is limiting. Then we rubbed everything out until there was the barest of outlines left on the page, fixed it with the artist's equivalent of hair spray and started again. We had to build up five layers to make a picture. Forewarned is forearmed you might think? Oh no, who forgot to leave enough space for her head? I forgot her boobs in one picture, hastily adding them towards the end of the time, only to see that they looked as if they had been transplanted in the wrong place altogether! Another sketch gave her an enromous boil like extension to her bum. Thankfully she did not take this personally!
After a lovely stroll down by the Mawddach estuary we went back to work in oils. Aaargh, by this time I really felt out of my depth. The others were mostly secondary art teachers and could draw; of the few primary staff, my skills were the least evident! But I had fun. The oils were quite an experience, we had to dab bits of colour. No filling in the marrows as he said, so dab it! Well I dabbed so well they called me Mrs Matisse, do you imagine that is good or bad?
I have an oil painting of mine which is going to be finished and hung on my walls, I might even hang the headless nude in charcoal too. It was fantastic and I wanna learn to draw!!!
posted by Liz at 19:13
1 Comments:
Wow! That does sound like an amazing weekend! Good for you! Any chance we might get to see this headless nude?
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