TIM BAKER

Another fortnight, another Portraits At The Pub session. This one was a little strange, I couldn’t get into it (it reminded me of some of the life drawing sessions where I was unhappy with what I was doing and started to experiment) hence the various media I used during this one. And indeed drawing the lamp that was in front of me at one point because I was more interested in that. Drawing the background or other people in the session is something I did a lot i life drawing when I wasn’t happy about how it was going.

I actually like the surrealism of the ‘Lady with the Lamp(head)’ – I did actually plan to do something more Jacob Epstein with it, but bottled out. I actually wanted to use my Woody Pencil but couldn’t find it, I need to get another one, so used the very similar Inktense pencil. That’s actually blacker, I find.

The Thin paint sticks were in effect as usual – the better pieces. The fountain pen was hard because the model kept moving their hands – reminders of this aborted oil portrait. It’s a major bugbear of mine as hands are hard at the best of times, without the model moving them repeatedly.

As I said in that blog post of the abandoned oil portraits of John, I expect people to move a bit, they aren’t statues. But when they keep completely changing the pose it’s impossible in ink, cos you can’t change it. So I kind of gave up on that drawing….this happened a few times. This has been the first time that we’ve had a model that did that, these sessions use amateur models and it’s surprising how good people are, or they say if they need to move and then they re-pose. Even dogs have been still!

Still I’ve been recently drawing moving dinghies on the river, wild animals like deer and geese so I should be able to do this – that’s partly why I shifted to quicker media in this session. So the aforementioned paintsticks which you can draw really fast with, and even at the end we all did that fun ‘draw without looking at your paper’ technique. I got some very abstract results, which still look like her.

Another quick technique is ink brush, so got out the Kuretake filled with roTring ink and went to town. This is one of the good ones of this session. As always I love the blooming of ink in water…some watercolourists hate blooms, I love them and encourage them. They probably think I amateur, but it’s part of the medium and it makes fairly boring flat areas interesting, with clouds of fractal cloud shapes.

And finally the best paint stick piece – not sure about the hands/foreshortening arm proportions. I plead the fifth re: movement, any models reading this – aspiring or otherwise – artists can’t really do flattering results, or even accurate ones if you keep moving. Hence I went abstract where it doesn’t matter. I do like the face though, as abstract as it is, it has a reality and a resemblance to it. Also I like the fact I just said ‘fuck it’ about the background, sometimes I pay too much attention to those.