Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Bristol environ



Bristol is an interesting city to live in with lots to sketch. I had the pleasure of sketch-crawling with my talented French colleague Monsieur Zebe. We passed a couple of lazy Saturday afternoons sketching people & buildings around town.



The Llandoger Trow pub is apparently where Stevenson was inspired to write Treasure Island & Defoe came up with Robinson Crusoe.


Check out Zebe's version.


Now the summer is (sometimes) here the riversides are full of people relaxing & drinking in the sun.



Around the harbour close to Aardman there are lots of stationed train wagons, cranes & crusty old boats to sketch.


See Zebe's sketch of the same crane here.





The Bristol Mod-Squad often bring their customised Lambrettas down to the harbourside to show off. One of them has the Godfather theme as a horn tune.


You can't beat some good old traditional Morris dancing!




On a day trip out of Bristol I visited Wells and drew the famous Cathedral. Later that afternoon I climbed up to Glastonbury Tor.


Bath and Wells are very close to Bristol & both towns offer great architecture to sketch.

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Life Drawing pt.10

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Managed to loosen up a bit this week. I worked at A3 size with an assortment of brush pens and dried out calligraphy pens.


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By the final few poses I was having fun and exaggerating the proportions. After 10 weeks we're starting to see the models repeat their 'stock' poses so caricature can help liven things up.

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Tuesday, July 07, 2009

Today's Nude

Last week several of us took part in the life drawing initiative tied into the Channel 4 series Today's Nude. Free life classes were staged across the country to encourage people to start drawing & of course we couldn't resist going along to the Bristol class as it was just down the road from the studio.










The first episode of the series is online here. It features Maggi Hambling talking about her approach to & philosophy of life drawing. She's a terrific artist & it's fascinating viewing.

Those of us in the 'Arthur Christmas' story team have started a blog dedicated to the life classes we've been attending.


I've added some recent sketches to the Urban Sketchers blog here. There are more here too.

I've also put up the first part of my report on my last visit with Ronald Searle.