meldrum artI paint these Naked Hands at lunch time, I take my time and invariably I overwork them, I get scared, I have too much time to think, I dab the brush 100 times too many. Life drawing is different, there I have only five or ten minutes to execute the watercolour, the result is a painting that contains life and energy. I am learning, in the mean time; here is a muddy, overworked Naked Hand.
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| Naked Hand 20130910. 9 x 14 cm Moleskin. |
I was very excited about attending my first life drawing evening after the summer break. It was a two hour pose at, “The Swedish Academy of Realist Art“. I was a bit too eager and so my watercolour study failed, luckily I didn’t give up and managed to do one half-decent sketch. The model’s underarm does not look correct but otherwise I’m quite pleased with it.
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| figure drawing 20130905 |
I used Arches 300gsm rough paper originally which is wonderful to paint on if you have time but is too slow-drying for figure painting with tempo. I don’t think my fellow artists would appreciate me using a hair drier every ten minutes either.
It sounds like one of those bad newspaper headlines. As for the watercolour which took me two lunch breaks, – it’s all right, I learned a few things which is the point of drawing and painting these in the first place. I’m happy enough with the result, a mixture of success and failure.
Life Drawing starts again tomorrow, I’m really looking forward to starting, it feels like it was a very long time ago since the last session.
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| Naked hand holds stopwatch! 9 x 14 cm Moleskin. |
Lunch sketch painted in my mini-watercolour Moleskin.
I had big plans to do a whole bunch of watercolours on my sailing trip. In reality it was almost impossible to concentrate for any length of time in the 35-36 degrees of heat. Still, I had a wonderful holiday and my batteries are charged. The sketches are A5 in size approximately.
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| Reversed perspective. ( It felt right at the time! ) |
Here are a few more A5 pencil sketches from my holiday sailing around Corfu. The sketch book was a present from my son. 🙂
Currently I’m working on a large watercolour, it’s a real challenge, I’ve never worked in so much detail before and I’m pushing my technical limits to the maximum. So, it was necessary to take a little break and paint this little watercolour nude. I like the freedom of the way the colour pigment illustrates the figure.
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| Nude 20130719. Moleskin, A5, watercolour notebook. |
