Grand Union Canal sketch in a spare 20 minutes before life drawing

More life

Right now, it seems that my sketching takes place mostly at the fortnightly life drawing sessions. Time seems to flash past the rest of the week with work encroaching into other time or leaving me too tired to think constructively about art. Life drawing is a fixed point in my calendar that at least means I keep experimenting with technique.

Faces

At life drawing a fortnight ago, I decided to focus on faces (at least if her face was visible to me).

Resist

I am continuing to experiment drawing in conte crayon to provide a resist for subsequent layers in gouache. Here, in the life drawing, it proves a little haphazard.

Revelation

Once again the life drawing session includes 8 poses ranging from two to twenty minutes. For these sketches, I draw invisibly with white crayon on white paper, then either painted over it in gouache, or wet the paper and drew into the damp areas with a darker crayon. The white crayon forms a resist to the water based pigment. The last step is putting in an outline, maybe, or darker colours or perhaps some background colour. It’s all an experiment.

Prayer

Start with highlights

The first drawing illustrates the technique: on white paper draw in first the highlights in white that will variably resist pigment in the next stages. I am creating shapes with some randomness then enclosing the subject of the drawing in lines. The larger figure from the same pose on the same page is built conventionally applying colour and line first. I don’t know why I am doing this, but it’s fun and feels meaningful.

Sketch jumble

Free

Here again are drawings using white conte crayon and clear water to create an invisible image on white paper, developed by dragging a darker crayon over the marks, so the pigment is caught by the damp surface while sparing the drier areas of the white crayon resist. Then I draw lines into this to find the image.

I was trying for an inside out self-portrait, drawing without seeing, running my left hand over the bony prominences of my face, kneading the soft tissues, while drawing with my right. In this first, the empty sockets are coloured with the after image of pressing my eyes.

In the second of two pictures drawn in yellow, I imposed a green line showing what a face “should” look like: preconceived notions more than observation.

In her book At The Existentialist Cafe, Sarah Bakewell offers a bullet point summary of existentialism: that it is concerned with concrete human existence, different to that being other things have because we make choices and create ourselves, though constrained within situations. This is what Sartre regards as our being free. Anxiety is inseparable from existence. Human existence is ambiguous, both boxed within borders and transcendental.

Tree Being

Describing phenomena is not just about copying what I see but about the interface of my mind with the subject matter. What elements do I want to capture rather than what received ideas about trees do I want to impose on my drawing.

Here are a couple of sketches of the same trees on the canal bank, first drawn in pen and crayon, and a second time just dragging crayon across dampened paper.

Here I am looking up the slope to trees growing on what was once an iron age settlement, drawn in clear water and the damp image developed by dragging crayon over it.

Again looking at trees growing on the ancient settlement, I drew in water then crayon, sometimes laying down pigment, sometimes scraping back the soaked surface to reveal white again.

Then I started throwing Inktense semi-opaque watercolour onto it, with rather unclear purpose, also scraping back with a knife.

Then much later, I drew back into the dry surface in conte crayon, off site and no longer constrained by copying what I could see.