Monday, April 2, 2012

Last acrylic painting, recent sketching.

The final class in Acrylic painting was held on March 26th.  The previous week, Michael suggested we paint anything we wanted to on the last night, and he would be there to assist us on a one to one basis.
I decided to work on my American Indian portrait, and Michael praised my work in progress.  I was quite chuffed!  I almost finished it on that night, but it needs a bit more work on the finer details, so I won't post a photo of it here until I've completed it.
In the meantime, I've been using pastels, charcoal and pencils to do some sketching.  This one of some of our hens basking in the sunshine in the back yard was done with my cheapest colouring pencils - I use them if I'm just messing around or having a practice run.   I've never seen hens lie down like that, and it was quite tricky to capture them in those poses.

Last night, there were sleeping bodies all over our house - one cat on the bed (Tiger), the other under a chair in the dining room (Topsy) and the MOTH stretched out on the couch.  I thought it was a good opportunity to draw them all in charcoal while they were unaware of me.  I captured Tiger before he woke up, but Topsy opened her eyes and glared at me when I crouched down to draw her, and all I could get was this quick sketch of her cross little black face before she got up and moved away!  By that time Ken had woken up and wasn't in the mood to be a model for my scribbles, so that ended my session.

Today (Monday) I went down to the Yarra River in Templestowe with one of my arty friends (Val) and we spent a lovely couple of hours sitting under some shady trees, practising our drawing.  Val had a book of "how to paint for kids" and it had some interesting exercises on drawing and painting trees (one of my worst themes) so I dallied with those for a while.  The first page is done in Derwent pastel pencils -
 And the second page in water colours.
 I decided to get serious then, and drew this house and trees on the other side of the river, using charcoal to sketch it first, then added colour with the pastel pencils.

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