Life drawing at the Barn Studio...

Hello folks! It's been a while since I last posted, and actually a while since any actual artwork happened either! Time and energy have not been with me, and of course any time gathered and hoarded I spend catching up with my children...
Theres been a couple of trips to the seaside, a Robin Hood day at Brokers Wood, playground trips, bike rides and two new pet baby Guinea Pigs to get to know!

Robin Hood and Maid Marian

Meet Sparkles...

and Fluffy...!

But with the school holidays nearly over I've been itching to pick up some brushes again. I still haven't had chance to try out the new Russian watercolours I got at Art in Action back in July, and to my frustration haven't so much as picked up a pencil since...
So what better way to get going again than by a six hour all day life drawing workshop! This was at a new studio in Salisbury run by two great tutors with quite different approaches - the morning was tutored by animator Matthew Dean, and the afternoon by fine artist and illustrator Sean Slater who taught me a huge amount about life drawing a couple of years back and really put me on the right track.
I was painfully rusty and out of sorts, especially after driving an hour to get there, but it was a brillant workshop and a lot of information went in even if not much of anything decent came out of the pencil!

These were the best of them over the six hours starting with some very quick warm ups ranging from 10 seconds to about 3 minutes...

10 seconds for this one!

2 minutes

30 seconds

1 minute

1 minute

10 seconds and 1 minute I think

30 seconds

These next two I really enjoyed and were something I'd never done before - the model crossed the room holding a sequence of one minute poses as she went, so the overlapping sketches show the continuum of the movement. Not surprisingly this was part of animater Matt's section which was all about capturing movement, and I loved it...

Sorry about my scrunckled up paper, hope you can still see what's going on!

This scruffy one below I really struggled with because it was so hard to see what was happening beneath her long hair, but both tutors seemed to like it for some reason that's beyond me, so I'll leave it in!

And finally two slightly longer poses about 30 minutes each to end the day on with mixed results...

I'll be back soon with some WIP's for you if all goes well - a time stasis machine would help though!