Monday, December 23, 2013

1st Entry for Dec 8, 2013






 The Sunday morning was the monthly `longer poses' session of the 519 Community Centre drawing group, held at the 519. It's open to all to attend, and $10 for the 3-hour session.
Greg was back this time, and with added facial hair.  Usually the session has just the bright ambient light of the 3rd floor room, but this time one of the drawers brought in a spot light as well, which made for stronger highlights on the last three studies.
It took me a bit of time to get warmed up, and the first few short studies were complete throwaways. From the top, these are one 3-minute study, a 10-minute one, a 20-minute one and three 25-30 minute ones.
All these studies are on 18 x 24" sheets of paper.  The top two are Pitt calligraphy tip marker on 18 x 24" sheets of Canson Recycled Sketch. The 15-minute one is black and grey Pentel brushpens on Canson XL Drawing paper, and the one below it is the same materials on Canson Colorline paper. The bottom two are water-soluble graphite applied with a waterbrush and regular brushes on Canson Bristol paper.
The Colorline paper has quite a violet cast to it, and the study is okay enough to share, but I'm not especially happy with it. The lines overpower the shading, which looks overdone. The balance of line and minimal tone worked better in the one above.
The last two are nice as tonal studies, if slightly `under-exposed' as far as dark values go.

*You may have noted that a bunch of different types of Canson papers are cropping up for my studies lately - over a year ago I had bought a bunch of loose Canson sheets to try out, but decided none of them were suitable for the way I was then using charcoal, so they languished. I'm curious as to how they handle wet media, so I'm taking them out for test-drives now.
Thanks too, to the corporate largesse that attended Curry's re-organization of Woolfitt's Art Supplies after they bought it,  I got a few pads of Canson Recycled Sketch and XL Drawing paper for crazy cheap prices, enabling me to affordably do everything on acid-free paper of late. Plus I'm trying to clear out old unused paper before I get more (a bad habit of mine, the overstocking).

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