Showing posts with label portrait. Show all posts
Showing posts with label portrait. Show all posts

Wednesday, 22 May 2013

Figure And Portrait Sketching At Cholamandal Artists Village

Cholamandal Artists Village has become the fall-back venue for our sketching group. Apart from each of us choosing subjects of our choice, which we do on some occasions, the resident (professional) artists at Cholamandal arrange one or more still life compositions for us on each of our visits. They also sketch along with us to demonstrate the many ways in which we could explore each subject.

On a couple of occasions we also had people sitting for us. The first time this happened the model was a friend of one of our group of sketchers. We were told that he would be coming in a little later and therefore I warmed up by sketching the drapery that had been arranged as the backdrop for a still life composition.

Once Sumit (our model) arrived, while most of my friends attempted portrait studies I decided to sketch a full figure. I had sketched people from life only on a couple of occasions before this and was therefore quite pleased with the result. I took this photograph of Sumit after I had finished my sketch.



 


Some weeks later we had an old man sit for us. This time I tried to draw only his face and I think I did a fair job of it since the old man was very happy with it. That day a reporter from a daily newspaper had come to interview the resident artists at Cholamandal about the Sunday morning sketching sessions that they had been running for a long time and since we PencilJammers happened to be there that day, some of us were also interviewed. I was not interviewed but when the article appeared in the newspaper I was very surprised to find that my sketch had been included in the news report.


Saturday, 23 June 2012

My Second Blog



I am very glad to say that from the day I decided to do it (towards the end of May 2012)  I have been quite regular with my "30 minute" sketches. In fact so far, on the days when I have not had the time to sketch during my lunch break, I have come home and managed to do one to keep going at almost a sketch a day. And I have been posting these sketches in my second blog to track my progress.
 I am hoping to achieve two things through this exercise: 1. To improve my quick sketching skills. My aim is to be able to sketch fast without sacrificing details (or at least the illusion of details) and to do that with a refined technique, and 2. To develop my watercolour painting skills.


Last Saturday I kept to my resolve to paint every weekend and did one small watercolour sketch - a landscape in monocolour. This one took me about 30 minutes but, when it comes to painting, I have decided not to impose time restrictions on myself since I will only be doing it at home and probably only on weekends.

 I had actually planned to do another one on Sunday but wasn't able to do that. Hopefully I will manage a cople of watercolours this weekend. Let me see...

I propose to share some (but not all) of these quick sketches on this blog too on a weekly basis. If you would like to see the rest of these quick sketches, or if you would like to know anything about the sketches that you see here, you could check out my second blog, Racing Against The Clock.