Life Drawing: Winter '09 pt. 6

So, last Monday's life drawing class was possibly my most experimental session to date. As I posted previously, we're encouraged to experiment with materials and explore whenever possible, any methods of drawing that may be unfamiliar to us.

Having chatted to our tutor the previous week, I decided to have a go at drawing our model using guache on glass.



Pushing paint around with my fingers was an interesting experiment - it sort of got me closer to the subject in a lot of ways, because I was literally that much closer to what I chose to make my drawing with.



Doing this also highlighted every element that goes into the process of drawing - but particularly how it feels to draw.



As you'd expect, the importance of choosing the surface you work on was also really apparent to me. Just compare the photograph I took of the drawing above (where it's resting on a sheet of cartridge paper) with this photo of the exact same drawing held up and away from a surface:



The tonal variations in the drawing are much more apparent when the glass is held up because of the way light refracts through it.

So for the rest of the evening, I had the sheet of glass propped up a few inches off the paper so I could see that translucency as I worked.

Here's another comparison of the same drawing laid flat on paper:

and then held up away from the surface:


I drew all of these using with both hands which is really great btw!



Another cool thing about drawing on glass is that you can flip the image for an instant variation:




As you can see I had a blast doing all these drawings. Aside from being incredibly fun and intense, working like this inspired several ideas for a short film I've been mulling over.