Life drawing and some photography

On Monday I took the day off from my day job to get some artwork done.

The first half of the session was spent doing three 40-minute life drawings, working in compressed charcoal on large (565mm × 760mm) sheets of paper. Charcoal is less forgiving of mistakes than pencil—you can’t erase it—so it took a while to get into it, but I particularly like the line and tone in the third of the three drawings.

The second half was photography. I wanted to get some photographs taken of an idea that I’ve been thinking about since February, that I’ve written about on this blog in February and again in March.

I’ve said before that I don’t really see myself as a photographer - I use photography as a way of sketching out and exploring ideas. Photography allows me to quickly produce a large number of images to solidify an idea that exists in my head whilst mixing in the usual artistic “happy accidents” that come from unexpected events outside of my control: a particular pose of the model, the way light hits and shadows fall, and so on. The photographs tend to be used as reference material for future artwork in a different medium.

I’ve tentatively entitled this series the Crow Priestess. The title may change in the future, but it is certainly part of the theme that I’ve been working on over the past couple of years related to mythology.

I’ve posted four of the Crow Priestess photographs on this site - you can see them over here.