Old Drawings

As I mentioned in my last post, today I've been going through my plan chest and looking at some old drawings. Here's some of them. They're virtually all life drawings.

I quite like this one. Grey paper, layer of charcoal scrubbed in as a midtone, erased in light areas, overdid the white conté though didn't I? What a mug. ...I think that eventually became my modus operandi in life drawing sessions. Not on grey paper though, doesn't really make much sense to scrub in a midtone on a paper that's already toned. Having a look through these makes me really want to get back on the observational drawing.

There were a few times when we had "experimental life drawing" class with a different tutor. All in all I wasn't a fan of this class or the tutor, but one or two vaguely interesting things came out of it. It was more about messing around and doing shit quickly with different materials than it was about accurate drawing. In retrospect it could have been a good opportunity to play around and go nuts. Oh well.

More life drawing. I'm not sure how old some of these are, they're from various different points in time. Some are better than others, some are pretty shit, but I thought all these had some degree of visual interest one way or another. That's why they're going on the blog. I can't be arsed to write about all of them.

Heh, look at her tiny little legs. Dickhead.

Close up!

He must have been sitting on something that mostly obscured his other leg and I didn't bother drawing it, didn't establish any context to the figure so it looks like he's sort of squatting to take a shit. On one leg!

The last one was a location drawing from the Imperial War Museum..I think. I had a terrible habit of whacking tippex all over pen drawings at the time. Really fucking ugly, and my line quality was pretty poor at this point, sort of scratchy and unconfident and my perspective is well off... BUT, I reckon that's a pretty strong composition except for maybe the V2 rocket. I can't believe I had the patience to do this however many years ago it was.

I really want to get back into observational drawing. Location drawing, life drawing, painting from life. I really think I could push myself if I could find some venues to pursue these things. I didn't really take things as seriously as I could have done at Uni or make the most of the stuff available to me when it was all there, easily accessible. I look at some of this stuff with proportional problems and crappy drawing and bad choices of values and I just know I could do so much better now.