At the super friendly life drawing class held in the unlikely confines of Surrey Quays Shopping Centre by the artist Rod Kitson, the very talented Hannah gamely modelled during a brutal heatwave. For the first hour, we shook out the nerves with a series of short poses that were captured with scribbles and scrawls – wonderful work from Hannah which I’d been quick enough to capture better. My final warmup sketch of around 8 minutes is here:

Then, after a quick break (with a much-needed sugar hit from a homemade peanut butter brownie supplied by one of the other sketchers), it was time for a one hour final pose. I used a few Faber-Castell Pitt pencils, previously experimented with my sketch of Morgue, but on a smaller piece of paper and thus, more tentative in application. I wanted to convey some of the pretty intense warmth in the room through the tones, and Hannah’s wonderful resilience in holding strong through it.

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A further session with Hannah, also held in heatwave conditions (albeit a bit less brutal), followed a couple of weeks later at Adrian Dutton‘s very lovely class in my neighbourhood, at the Hackney Wick Community Baths cafe. With no long pose to build to, I opted for vine charcoal on newspaper stock for some quick and easy sketches. As ever, time got away from me and I didn’t always do justice to the model’s excellent work (her classic gallery-worthy standing poses especially) but I was happy with some tricky foreshortening exercises.