WIP - carbon pencil

Here is another drawing that I did on Saturday night which kept me entertained while half watching a DVD. I still need to refine areas but will leave it for a few days before going back to it to get some distance. I only used carbon pencils for this.

Couple of carbon pencil portraits

Here are two carbon pencil drawings on A4 HP Arches I did back in February for my Mum's birthday. I really struggled getting decent scans or photos as lighting wasn't great and I only had one shot as I had to get them posted.

Tranquility - the last resin piece

Here is the fourth larger resin piece I did for the Mercure. I have about 6 or 7 small pieces on the boil too at the moment which I will use to replace current work at Cafe Apollo, but they are still in varying stages of completion. This one is the feeling of the sea at the end of the day with the glowing sky. This one is 700 x 550 x 40mm.

Icy Morning - another resin piece

This is one of the four resin mixed media pieces that I completed last week and hung at the Mercure Windsor Hotel yesterday. It is 600 x 475 x 40mm in size and has a collaged base with various textured papers, then multitudes of glazes and then silver leaf rubbed in and then resined. I then drop more silver left in when the resin is first applied so it is suspended in it.

This particular painting is my expression of an icy crisp clear winter's morning in Christchurch. Though I have lived in Auckland for almost a decade, I will stay a CHCH girl at heart and I do love the crispiness of those frosty winter days and prefer them to the wetter warmer winter we experience in Auckland.

Life Drawing Saturday Workshop

Yesterday I attended a full day Life Drawing workshop. I enjoyed components of it and got frustrated with other parts. The model herself was excellent and did some excellent poses and while I enjoyed the exercises to loosen up, I was hoping for more longer poses in the afternoon as planned so that I could get stuck in, however the class wasn't that well structured and things that were supposed to be covered and to happen just didn't. So while I found it worthwhile overall, I did feel somewhat frustrated at the end of the day and that I didn't get the chance to really get stuck in.

I also like to blend with my finger, it is what I do naturally and I like the effect. However the tutor didn't like using fingers to blend and didn't in her personal style so I felt like I was getting told off when I did use my fingers. I appreciate learning from people who have their own techniques and styles and you can learn something different from each teacher, however I found it frustrating that if we used a technique that we liked that she didn't then pretty much we were told to wipe the pigment across the page and start again. That is one of the reasons I felt I came out with a whole lot of part-finished drawings that I would have got a chance to complete had I not be told to start something different half way through the post.

The tutor also liked the figure to touch at least 3 sides of the page so that it was cropped each time. I spent so long last year with the TLC DVD exercises getting to the point where I could fit the person on the page, so it was interesting to have a different point of view. And in fact the top drawing with the whole figure, I was told half way through to stop and only do a cropped part bigger, but in that case I said I would just keep going with what I was doing as there was 10 minutes left of class and once again I would have been left with a couple of partly completed drawings. Even then I didn't get it done and I might develop it further in a different format.

We did heaps of these exercises, when we had to keep the charcoal on the page and the model would move every 5 seconds. They were fun.

Here is another one that I started after being told to stop the previous one which had the whole body on the paper. So ended up having less than 10 minutes to work on this so didn't get far at all.

So overall, I wouldn't be interested in attending another workshop with that particular tutor which is disappointing as her work is fantastic and I did learn some things from her. Unfortunately though I felt that we were being directed to work in the styles and techniques she liked rather than being encouraged to develop our own styles. It was frustrating when you spend 20 minutes drawing a pose that you actually quite like and then the tutor grabs a piece of handtowel and wipes it all across the page. That is the first time I have been dissatisfied following an art workshop and my frustrations in the end were more dominant than the parts that I enjoyed.

More resin and this time RED!

I have been working on more resin pieces and this is one that I finished yesterday. I am not sure of the title yet but the size is 600 x 450 x 40mm. I have been doing a lot of thinking about what I love about these resin pieces and the thing I come down to the most is that for me they are tactile, I want to touch them and I do. Everytime I walk past one on the wall I reach out and touch it. Perhaps it is because the resin is protective and I can't damage it by touching it. Whereas I have some artworks on my wall at the moment that I am storing for a friend and they are incredible and I would be too scared to touch and in fact have no inclination to do so, because I would be scared of damaging them. And even if I owned them I would feel the same.

I am still finding it very hard to take a proper photo of these pieces and they are so much more in real life and the colours just glow. I ended up using a flash (which you can see in the photo reflecting) but without it the glaze layes just aren't showing up.