TIM BAKER

Yes I had my first life drawing in 2 1/2 years last week. I downed tools in the first or second week of March 2022 with a session with Asim – note no mention of the pandemic, the lockdown was that quick. And because the evening sessions at Cass Arts never came back, neither did I. Now Robin is doing a life drawing session in the Ancient Market House – yes the one I’ve drawn before, so with architecture like that, and the lure of Kit Kats I had to go along!

Alistair who is part of the old gang was there, so it was great to catch up with him, it was weird to be back but also strangely familiar, even in a new (grander!) setting.

I didn’t catch the name of the model sadly – I’ll have to ask Robin – but it was a good session getting back into working large with mostly new materials and trying to improve my proportions, something I had spotted was bad in my portraits. The face is usually fine, but sometimes I struggle with arms, shoulders and foreshortening.

As well as the woody pencils (black and white) used in the more representational piece above, I borrowd one of Robin’s Lyra 9B solid crayons – I must get some of these and did some bold large drawings in A2, and also as I expected the paint sticks were perfect for life drawing, more so than portraiture. The bold lines, fast drying and larger size was perfect. It’s crazy to think now I was doing Posca work like this and waiting for it to try, or even acrylic pieces and watercolour or even oil! Much too slow.

The sgraffito was in full effect, partly because of her dreads which actually made the back views quite difficult. I quite often did two pieces per pose, but not all of them made the cut – yes this is the curated session, there are more! A very productive session, although not sure about some of those arms….

More Lyra pencil pieces and a rare mixed media piece with woody pencil and fountain pen – love the patterns in this. I was aiming for more sketchbook pieces but actually only did a few in the end – these are nearly all sheet paper pieces, large. Maybe because I rarely get to work large – the largest I do is A3. One thing I cooled on life sessions was for that exact reason – the large pieces and storage.

It’s less of a problem now, but I have to say I threw away about half of my drawings I did between 2018-2020, including quite a few of the charcoal pieces featured here. What seems amazingly expressive and fluid at the time, and you always love your 5 minute sketch the most…becomes years later, something you look at and wonder what it is, and what the hell you were thinking?

Life sessions aren’t really for finished pieces like that, which is partly why I stopped and did less of them even before the pandemic as there wasn’t much I could use (although now I realise my portraits will benefit)…but you can do some nice work.

And as is traditonal the last pose was a horizontal one, and I did two sketches with paint sticks, both in the Canson XL sketchbook (I need to get another one, this one is nearly full, and if I don’t sell any more of the pieces I am going to work on the other sides). The first I love the expression, and the belly area, but feel I left it too naked on the background and of course missed the lower legs. So I moved onto another version.

I tried to rectify that with the second version, very different expression, made up of layering and sgraffito, I love the background – it was lines of browns and greens, very institutional and a light wood floor. Not too sure about the hair in this one but it definitely has a mood despite it’s shortcomings.

So will I do more? Yes, but I can’t do them every week as I used to, I can’t afford it, it will have to be a rare thing. And indeed while taking and editing the many photos for this, it was such a slog to weigh the lightweight paper down, take a photo of each and then edit the stones out in Lightroom…I was amazed that I used to do that nearly every week!

I have gotten used to the slower pace of the bi-weekly portrait sessions, but it would be good to occasionally alternate it with this.