Life Drawing with 2Bornot2BCollective and Eliana

A fantastic evening of life drawing with the @2bornot2bcollective - left me so energised. Enjoyed it right from the start, and even the 1-minute poses didn't seem rushed. And a wonderful model from Argentina, @exorquidea!

Sphere, Trinity College Dublin

I still had a bit of time on Sunday after finishing Judgement, so I decided to tackle the amazing sphere at Trinity College. By not painting a ground colour, it looks like it's floating, but I'm ok with that. And it almost looks like a sphere, doesn't it?

These are not easy, UCD

Onto the next watercolour project - I might have bitten more than I can chew.

There is a square of beautiful buildings at the Richview library. And the particular aspect I am trying to capture is 2 layers of modern against 2 layers of ancient (well, 1900) architecture. But I'm struggling to figure out what it is about that view that I want to represent - I have 7 contenders - so I'm not making much progress with my thumbnails. I keep repeating the same thing.

So maybe I need to step back and think of something simpler. I did try a zoomed-in view, but it gets too abstract I think. Now that we can move a little more freely, I might go back and try thumbnail sketches on location. All the buildings around that square are gorgeous, so it would be worth it! 

It's not easy when you only have a few photos to work from and you can't use streetview because it's a pedestrian area! 

I thought that the ink marker shapes on the back of the page might help me, but not really, although they are really pretty!!

In this first pass in watercolour, I got distracted by colour. But every bit of practise is useful, I hope! Even if it's just to discover that I adore those windows (5). And also, I realised that the close-up view means nothing unless I use colour temperature and edges to clarify which building is in front of which!!

So, I took a deep breath and a step back, and used a notanised photo to try and work out how to approach this. But then I just get a lot of darks with very fine white window frames floating in the middle! What to do?? How to connect these elements? And is my painting ability too rough to do justice to the exquisite details in this building? Maybe I should just go back to painting skies. Maybe that's what I'll do for 30x30?

Covid Haircut

Could have been worse!

USk Admin Zoom

What do you do when you have a Zoom meeting with Admins from Urban Sketchers groups from all over the world? You sketch of course! Not my most sophisticated bit of sketching, but hey!

Judgement

A great idea last week with Dublin Sketchers, to pick a piece of public art we like. For me, it had to be UCD, and this beautiful piece in front of the school of law, called Judgement.

For the last 53 days or so, we've been walking Timber in UCD, at least once a day, sometimes twice. And it is lovely to still find the beauty in it. I know that some days I feel like I need to go somewhere else, but it has been such a peaceful refuge in these days of lockdown, and for that I'll always be grateful. 

All ready, and nowhere to go

A Zoom outage in the Asia data centre meant we couldn't see our Japanese model last week. I was all ready with my watercolours. Ah well. Those things happen!

Life Drawing - Beatrix

Who would have thought I'd be going back to charcoal? But these fast-paced poses from Life Drawing Barcelona required me to adapt. I can't say that I'm happy with the result, but at least I was able to keep up! And you wouldn't know it from the way I drew, but the model had really expressive hands. I need to practise hands! Next thing on the list!

Trying to draw loosely

From some of Brendan's photos (@beebeepix1 on Instagram).

Consciously trying to hold the pen looser.