First Weekend Class

I did my first weekend class for my Diploma course last weekend - Shades of Grey with Robert Franken. It was about charcoal drawing. We had big sheets of brown paper and worked from life in the morning, with other exercises in the afternoon.

The first afternoon exercise was drawing found objects. I did a leaf and twig as shown after the break.

The second afternoon we filled in a large oval with charcoal then used erasers to cut back into the charcoal to get a tonal variation. We could choose any of our sketches to base it on and I chose a 3/4 back view of our model. The sketch was about 4 cm high and the final drawing is about 1 m high, so a lot of it had to be made up/remembered. I think the final result is quite pleasing.

It's a good illustration of firstly how much information you can get from a simple sketch, and secondly how little information you actually need from the sketch to create quite a detailed final work.

The part I had most trouble with was the ear, as I had not captured it correctly in the sketch. I still don't think I got it quite right - the shape is not right for the angle of the head.

This weekend I have another class - Structure and Form, with Catherine Hayes and Dan Wilkinson. The Saturday as I understand is looking at how bones fit into the body, and using this knowledge to help get the proportions and connections correct. The Sunday is building on this to add some body to the structure. Should be good fun.