May 2023 life-drawing

Following on from April’s blog post on my life-drawing practice, I wanted to give a quick overview on what’s been happening in May (even though it’s not over yet, and I hope to get even more drawing done before the end of the month).

So a quick recap of my summary from April’s post:

I think I’m somewhere close to how I want to draw now, but — whilst studiously steering clear of whimsy or soft-focus — I’d like to introduce a bit more haze (for want of a better word) in places to contrast with the more brutal “bruised raw flesh and bone” feeling that I was pleased with in the drawings from the second session (I should note that I want to retain much of the “bruised raw flesh and bone” feeling, but I think a bit of haze alongside it would work even better).

I think this will mean slightly reducing the amount of white and black Conté crayons, reserving them for more extremes of light and dark, and letting the sanguine Conté crayon deal with a greater range of the midtones and also take a more dominant role in the definition and line of the figure.

On the first Sunday in May I took this to more of an extreme - I completely eradicated the use of the black Conté crayon, leaving just the sanguine and white:

And the following Friday I continued in this vein with three more drawings, one of which is shown here:

I think this is going well, and I’ve been pleased with the progress with this technique so far.

Long-suffering readers of this blog may have noticed that I’ve been concentrating on drawing technique in my artistic practice over the past few months, as opposed to creating work for my Acid Renaissance series.

Some of this has been due to the dark and gloomy months of winter, which we finally seem to have escaped, and some has been due to feeling a bit creatively blocked on that series.

But it’s been instructive to concentrate on the basic skills of observation and technique for a while, and this can only help me with my other artwork when I resume it.