This was a fun exercise. We moved to white Stonehenge paper and two shades of Prismacolour grey. The assignment was to draw this cowboy from a vintage photo. A face with character and a photo with a full range of values, from bright white to deep black. I thought I'd show the progression of the drawing, how I built it. The class participants all have different styles and approaches, but this is mine. I'd say it took about 20 hours to finish.
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In the Fall of 2008, I participated in a soft pastels painting course - my first (and so far, only) pastels class - run by David Shkolny at Harcourt House. I started to do some reading about soft pastels and found out that it's probably not a good idea to use them in high traffic areas like my living room, which is where I set myself up and made a about a dozen drawings/paintings. I don't know what to call them. Most artists insist they are paintings but it felt more like drawing to me. Anyway, the dust from the pastels can be toxic depending on the concentration of heavy metals in the pigment and most information out there strongly suggests working in an area away from children, pets and food, cleaning with damp cloths and mops daily and even wearing a dust mask and latex gloves! Yikes. There's nowhere in my home that's safe from this insidious medium! This kind of breaks my heart because I really, really like playing with them, not to mention the $300 worth of pastels and pastel paper that are now sitting around my (carpeted) studio in the basement.
So, if you have any solutions to my conundrum (no, I'm not going to rent space somewhere else), I'd like to hear them! In the meantime, I posted some of those baby-steps pastel drawings on a Pastels page on the left, if you's like to see. Oh, and if you want to see what pastel paintings are supposed to look like, check out David Shkolny's web site or one of my other faves, Elizabeth Mowry. Whew! Still on the white pencil. Learning so much by doing.
Finished up the portrait of a young girl. Homework. But by the time I finished her, I felt like I knew her - and I don't. Don't have a clue who this beautiful child is. Then, feeling antsy, I went looking for an idea and found a photo of a white horse that intrigued me. When I was young, like so many other girls, I drew horses. This is my first one in over 40 years. Staggering, really, that I've waited so long. This animal seems so pensive and introspective, if you can say that about horses. It's a quality that I wanted to capture in a drawing. So here they are. I'm in love. I registered in a Suzanne Lamoreaux coloured pencil workshop and went to the first one last Thursday at Artra in Edmonton. It was a quiet, intense evening and at the time, I had no idea how much I was absorbing and learning. She gently took us through an introduction to monochromatic drawing with white pencil on black paper. I don't think I've done this before, which is kind of surprising. But I've gotta say, that white pencil moving across the deep black paper just kind of got a grip on me and I was swept away by the soft magic, the shadows and light, the image emerging from beneath my hand. I was astounded, mesmerized. Homework was to finish the exercise we were working on (from a photo of the face of a young girl) and then to find something else to draw. So I went for easy, and drew a sheep. But when you're hungry, you have to eat and I was just itching to try something else, and maybe something a bit more challenging - like a portrait of my husband. I'm so tickled with the result. Of both. What fun. It's only taken my whole lifetime to learn how to draw. But it seems, finally, to be coming together. |
Welcome to my occasional posts
My name is Yvonne Rezek. This is a blog about what my hands are up to. Mostly sketches and drawings, some of my pottery, maybe even some knitting.
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