It’s now a few weeks since I completed the watercolour course and received tutor feedback. I was glad to read that assignment 5 was well received and about the generally positive tutor feedback.

Looking back over my work for the course, I think that I made progress in some areas. When starting, I had practically nonexistent experience with watercolours, and feel now much better acquainted with the medium. I also like the departure towards some mixed media experimentation. But I also think I may not have given myself enough opportunity to play around with watercolours beyond course exercises. It is certainly due to my overall very tight schedule and the necessity of focused time management, but I rarely do things “just for fun” and this playful aspect is missing in my work for the course.

I wasn’t aware of it during the course, it has only recently dawned on me that I’m in no way obliged to do only project-relevant exercises in my sketchbooks. I’m currently studying printmaking as an extra, on-top module besides the courses I’m doing for the painting degree. Only now I’m beginning to become a bit looser, experimental and more playful in approach. It may also be related to my mature age and a life dominated by my non-artistic full time job. It requires much effort to develop my creative activities and the different mindset that’s needed.

It’s a pity that I have no “official reason” to continue with watercolours. I feel there’s still so much to learn and to discover, but the courses I’ll be taking subsequently do not develop watercolour painting any further. I was hoping that I might integrate the habit of regular sketchbook work using watercolours, will see whether this is going to suit me in future work. I’ve recently began researching into chinese and japanese ink paintings and found the emphasis on expressive brushstrokes very interesting and worth further exploration. I’ll also get back to the human figure and life drawing (or painting) classes, because I would like to take the subject of my final assignment further.

So overall, I’m full of ideas and topics for continued work with watercolours after the course, curious where this might take me in the future.

After completing the assignment, I went to the fourth session of the life drawing class. We had a female model and today Matthew Fischer, our instructor, suggested we’d use pencil for a change, if we’d like. He explained how we could obtain deep tones by cross-hatching in layers, starting with hard pencils and using increasingly soft pencils.

I liked the suggestion and wanted to try it out, but then was too busy getting the proportions right and so lost track of it. The model stayed in a single pose which she retained for 20 minutes. After each pose, she had a brief pause of 5 minutes to relax, then returned. But as it was, the pose was always slightly changed and in a group of 5 persons, I wasn’t in the mood of fiddling with directions how she might change this or that until it was as before. But the changes were too gross to continue with the drawing, so I decided to start anew each time. So in the end, I had 4 separate quick drawings of the same pose, rather than one worked out study with shadings.

The third one was made in charcoal for a change, when I felt that I was too timid with the pencil. This one I like best from the series and I’m also happy with the moment I chose to stop, rather than continue and overwork. For the final drawing, Matthew suggested I’d make a close-up of the face, and I agreed because I thought he was right that I had neglected the face so far, and I could manage this in the final 20 minute session. But then by accident I kneeled and the new view of the model was so interesting that I decided to do just another complete figure. All drawings are on 45 x 60 cm paper.

Another aspect was that of ‘planes in three dimensional space’ to construct the figure, I had been so impressed when this had been mentioned last time and I wanted to use the approach in my drawing. But somehow I wasn’t able to, so the fourth drawing looks again similar to 1 and 2. I like it a bit better because I used a softer pencil which made a somewhat darker line. I think the drawing is also slightly more confident with the construction of the body and the pose, so I see some improvement over 1 and 2.

There’s yet another life drawing session to come, before the class terminates. I found out about some ongoing drop-in life drawing sessions and think it would be good if I continued to practice. I feel that the figure topic is still open and interesting for me beyond the assignment series of paintings. I might take this further in future work for myself and OCA courses.

Final life drawing class session

It won’t be the last life drawing session I’ll do, but this was the final class of the course at the 92Y Art School to which I had enrolled. We had the same female model as the week before, and I had brought with me huge paper sheets cut from a roll. They were about 80 x 100 cm, easily three times as large as I usually draw. I had taped two huge foamboards together and put the sheets inside for transporting them to the class, and then used the same improvised foamboard portfolio as a support for drawing. This went quite well. The huge formate was scary at first, but then I just did my best to capture the figure on the sheet.

This time, I stayed with my drawing over consecutive sittings despite slight variations in the position after each short break. I think I worked two 20 minute sessions on it. Honestly I’m quite happy with the result.

I really enjoyed working large scale and would have wanted to extend this to my watercolour practice as well. Instructor Matthew had introduced indian ink in that final class and I did give it a try, but felt stressed during that last half hour of the class and wasn’t happy with the result. Although, looking at it now a few weeks later, I see interesting qualities in it which I wasn’t able to see at the time.