Life Drawing

Life Drawing: Christmas

Using paint

9/12/14

Before using the paint, we first did a sketch using charcoal, however, instead of using the media in the conventional sense, we attached it to the end of a stick, stood back and sketched the skeletons that way. This allowed for practise to looser movement when drawing, and also required a lot more concentration. Since I was off the week before, this was my first time using a stick, however, I am especially pleased with how it turned out

 (Note: Because it is nearing christmas, our skeleton subjects had been decorated with baubles, hence the circle on the top of its head)

After this we then moved on to using paint, however, we weren't to use paintbrushes, only our hands. As well as this, we were only given the three primary colours and white paint to use, with instructions not to blend the paint to create new colours, and only to let it mix on the page when applying it, once again, we were not to blend the colours on the page. The paint had a simply objective, which was to show low lights and highlight through the use of primary colours, and while most show high lights in yellow and low lights in blue, I decided to use red for my low lights and yellow for my highlights.

I started off by applying the highlights, so as to avoid blending the colours as much as possible, however as I went further through the painting I concluded that this was futile, as when it came to applying the red they blended anyway, resulting in a rather pleasing transition from yellow to red, which showed the shadowing more. I then added blue so that it wasn't all colour and, using the back of my nail, applied it in a scratchy fashion around the skeleton as an outline. later on I added a little white for extreme highlight. Blue was also used for extreme low lights.

We then did another painting in the same fashion, however, this time, we were to look at Fauvism, specifically, we were to pay attention to Henry Matisse, and how he used block colours to show highlights and low lights on the face.
This time I was prepared, and using Blue for low lights, yellow for highlights and red for extreme low lights, I used a different finger for each different colour application and began to work in blocks of colour, carefully applying

Overall, my impression of working in this style was rather good, as I found it allowed you to express more and try more things, where as when using a brush, it restricted me in a way that, when using a brush, I felt I had to be neat. Using my hands to paint broke me out of that idea, and so I began to experiment more, and so I enjoyed it a lot more.