Saturday, February 27, 2010

Life to the next level


Today was session two of 'Studio Tate', which is a series of four full-day life drawing sessions at the Tate Modern run by London Drawing. Each session is themed, this week's being tone. Every lesson begins with a re-invigoration of traditional drawing techniques then introduces alternative ways of describing the body, keeping the theme of the day in mind.

Our journey into tone took us from pencil and charcoal mark-making, into collage and finally manipulating light and shadow. The image above shows my experimentation during the final stage. We only had 45 minutes, so there wasn't much time to think about getting the proportions perfect, but it was great to mess around in this new territory and start thinking of ideas for other applications.

Moving from the traditional into more experiential techniques, really demonstrated how the first was a fundamental step into understanding the form, whereas the latter leads to a more creative and original approach to problem-solving and describing.

Also, I found that the best thing about working in such short time frames with unfamiliar techniques, is that it frees you up to make mistakes and let loose, which can sometimes lead to wonderful suprises.

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