TIM BAKER

As you might have guessed, unlike the other creative endeavours I’ve felt that the life drawing has been rather unsuccessful in recent weeks. Well enter Sarita, an amazing model. Turns out my ennui was more the fact I was uninspired by the models we have been having (mostly repeat appearances) who quite often look bored, which doesn’t give any energy or interest for me to put on the page. This was not the case with Sarita!

Subject is king with fine art. You can imagine and extrapolate, but faced with a bored model who doesn’t inspire you, it makes it a lot harder to find something to work with. The muse isn’t a cliche. The model isn’t a lump of meat, it’s more like portraiture, it is a collaboration with them, and their character and mood (negative or positive) can affect the session, for good or worse.

But Sarita, with her locks and headwrap looked bold, interesting, and the dreadlocks were a technical challenge. This is why I moved from my usual fine pigment liner back to my old graffiti / Posca style – and found there was life in the old dog yet.

Certainly I had to bring my ‘A’ game, which means I can’t be bored and there is space for developing new things, and revisiting old ones.

The traditional skills didn’t get ignored, I did two nice watercolours, which despite my current problem (proportion, it’s like I forget all I’ve learned when I go into ‘portrait’ mode?) I think have good skin tones – another challenge since I’ve mainly worked with different skin tones, and I think her character shines through despite my technical fumbles. Also some nice drawings – including a moody compressed charcoal sketch. I do love what is called ‘compressed charcoal light’ which is more of a mid-dark grey colour.

But the stars have to be the Posca pieces, surprisingly.

A chance comment by Robin who runs the sessions and works with Sarita regularly (she’s an abstract painter as well as model) that I make my own markers meant I was showing her my New York Mop and home-made markers during the break. I wanted to show her how I use them – so in the second half I did some work in my older style, which painterly style suited her look and character better.

A new thing is I was trying cross-hatching and something I learned from the watercolours that background is important (if you have time) so I was trying to ‘mix’ the Markers on the page, layer them. I found interestingly that the acrylic works as a ‘resist’ to the leather dye, I guess acrylic and solvent-based ink don’t bond together, which came in useful for the best piece featured at the top – used silver and blue Posca with the locks and laid down the NY mop twice.

All said, a great session.