A fantastic first session at Leytonstone’s Creative Life Drawing with an unusual but very enjoyable setup – a series of short warm up poses, increasing in duration, followed by a 2 hour single sitting pose (allowing for breaks, of course). After a few sessions where, despite bringing a raft of different coloured papers and materials, I ended up reverting to mostly single colour on a neutral midtone, I wanted to experiment a little and take some risks. First, the short poses up to around 5 minutes, overlapping in coloured pencils – a different colour per pose:

As the time to draw increased to around 7-10 minutes, I wanted to play with some heightened, but somewhat appropriate, skin tone Faber-Castell Pitt pencils to see whether I could interpret the bright, multi-source daylight that was flooding into the spacious room’s windows:

I used a caput mortuum for line and shadow, cinnamon for the hot shadows, light flesh for the lighter areas, and rose carmine for the hotter pink areas. This was augmented with white for reflective highlights, a little vanilla Derwent pastel to try and approximate the halogen light that was also in the scene, and some cadmium red snuck into shadows to keep those interesting.

Two poses followed of around 15 minutes, which encouraged me to keep experimenting with this overall approach:

While sketching, the model was able to hold these poses so exceptionally, and they had such fascinating angles, that I would in retrospect have preferred to simplify the approach and concentrate instead on line and form only. The tones in the 2nd piece, the last before the long pose, didn’t come naturally, and felt a little fussy and piecemeal.

However, with 2 hours to work on a single pose and little at stake, I carried the approach through to the main drawing. The first thing down was a portrait – Morgue held her head at a particular angle that thought was really interesting and what emerged was something of a caricature, but one that captured something of the subject in a way that felt recognisable. The exaggerations led me to follow this through when sketching out the rest of the figure. I simplified and elongated as that was what resonated with the model’s pose and presentation – athletic and poised. The way the arms wrapped, one up across her shoulder, the other down across the thigh, presented an opportunity to exaggerate length, especially as I was seated for the session which made her look quite monumental in a way she may not had I been at a easel matching the eye level. The giant hand was not actually present, but just seemed like it would be more fun to draw.

The ambient light in the room was lovely to work in but did not offer any particularly deep shadows to hang on to, which made me quite tentative in terms of tonal range. There was a lot of pencil skimming before committing. I also didn’t really work in any cooler tones, although using pastel blocks to sketch out the large window behind her gave me a motivation for some pale blue highlights skimming the back, with a few flashes on the bar stool and the feet to tie the piece together.

Finally, there was just time to work into the stool itself, to try and introduce that darkness that may have been missing elsewhere, and a post-session decision to pull the figure out of the murk of the grey paper with a vibrant colour to contrast. I chose this kind of raspberry purple to offset the dark green, and also as a colour that would help motivate the more outré pinks in the figure. It also steered clear of the orange and yellow of her hair highlights. There was no particular plan with this in terms of shape – I didn’t want to emulate a real background, although a horizontal bar was introduced to give an impression of a floor line.

All in all, a fun experiment! I’d like to somehow incorporate more pastel blocks in the early going to shake out the tentative nature of pencil lines, or at least find a way to make those first strokes come more naturally. But this stylised exaggeration was an enjoyable break from attempts to capture accuracy.