Three day Portrait Summer School

Varying success but learnt a lot and discovered much better teacher.  I have enrolled in his thursday evening classes. He is a young professional artist, exhibiting in London and New York - sad thought that even good artist has to earn money.  He did teaching training early on so he was prepared and has taught in some good schools. This is his website.  http://www.benjaminsenior.com

Cant believe i have him for free.  He is more like the tutors I had at Westminster and has masses of great comments and tips, supportively pointing out errors.  The other teacher i have had for past year makes few comments and most are useless cliched praise.  She's old fashioned, doesn't have website and is terrified of my ipad drawing.   I may cancel her class, not sure, at least its a free model session.  So i will have thursday evenings and friday afternoons.(school has now divided 10 week terms into 2x 5 weeks so i haven't enrolled in nov/dec or jan/feb cold dark evenings tho i may enrol in them later).  I feel much more enthusiastic about next years classes and making progress.

I got my portrait done by woman who has the style i aim for.  My portrait of her was awful as u can see. We drew each drawing.  When i said i wanted to learn to draw moving person she ended up moving a lot, i didn't, so i ended confusing perspective of her side and front views.  I need sooo much more study and practice on proportions and perspective.  This weekend i will spend on studying the library books i have on this subject and make notes.  I need to know this stuff by heart.

I am on ipad so cant get to label pics lower on page so - there are my poor portraits of male model who i just couldn't get.  the third one is me almost ignoring him and just trying to get right head shape.  Then more successful, if a little boring portrait of fellow student, older woman based on photo.  Tutor took photos of us all the day before.  Hated mine.  You can see her photo attached to top left corner with a very handy grid he gave us all - a grid on acetate.  We didn't add grid to work to scale up but simply used acetate grid to line up the features.  This helped soo much in getting proportions right. I did a charcoal sketch first.  The second pic is work in development and then one of it at the end of our time on the exercise.

Lastly is the portrait the woman did of me and her lovely drawing of the same man in my first drawing.  Mine has crude shading and is more illustration.  Hers is full of subtle toning and beautiful free expressive lines.  Is great to have students better than me in class.  Can learn a lot.  Am usually somewhere in middle of class. In this one i was in top 1/4.   That's some progress but more to do with who turns up.

Drawing from photo, marking in face facets first to help locate proportions and  shading, tones and highlights.

We tried caricature 

My very bad portrait of woman who drew me.

Benjamin Senior

Two picture frames i made in class

There is only one £150 machinery i need.  Everything else i found cheap substitutes for.  I have more frames to make, including two for a friend when i can find the time.  I have to a little each day.  I am very slow so it would never make money.  Like most crafts, it's hard to include all your time in the price.  Still it will be useful for my own work and the occasional friend's.

Accidential fabric design

I was using bleach and got a few tiny spots on my favourite brown trousers.  Dilemma.  The spots were a lovely shade of orange and orange is in this year.  On the other other hand I am too fat and old for a large orange bottom, yes bottom in all senses.  But, since trousers will be too big by end of summer, i thought it would be fun experiment.  Result?  Love the pattern created by waving bleach bottle over trousers.  Interesting that the lightest bits are at edge of bleach blobs.  I like the marbled pattern, tho it does look a bit army camouflage and  but i do look like a clown.  I could tone down with brown dye, not really worth the money on dye, but maybe for experimental reasons.  Quite summery anyway.