seen from Sweden
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Drawingisfree
Portraiture to music on Zoom – each volunteer poses for the duration of a playlist track. All up, a dozen or so fast drawings in the hour, in a wonderful atmosphere of community and trust. All run and accompanied by the excellent Chloe Briggs in Paris, twice each Monday.
Drawing is free, fast and furious
Great online session last night, all tricky fingers and spectacles. Glasses are handy – the frames make a kind of secure reference point for judging the placing of features, lines and shadows. I decided to experiment with using harder pencils, since I usually end up covered in graphite and the high contrast can be a bit unsubtle. Didn’t think to bring my usual 5B–7B pencils to the computer, and once we had begun I didn’t want to go hunting. It did not go well. Didn’t look much different, but felt weirdly unfamiliar and downright clumsy. I sat out several poses, and struggled with likenesses more than usual.
Drawing is free and people are wonderful
Drawingonfree on zoom last night was flat out – fourteen portraits in and hour. It’s exhilarating, which is probably not ideal at bedtime. It’s 10pm down this end of the the world by the time we finish.
Last drawingisfree session for the year
I think my New Year resolutions will involve trying other media and especially colour. I simply can’t imagine adding decision-making into the three to five minutes you have for each sitter – not my forte.
On the back foot
Now Summer time has ended in NZ for now, drawingisfree is at a time I’m more likely to be wide awake, but also more likely to be distracted by other things. So I underestimated the length of our evening walk and arrived to Monday’s session late and flustered, and couldn’t find my decent drawing pencils, so had to settle for some odds and ends I’d discarded as less than ideal. Then the playlist was dominated by very short tracks, so I kept right on feeling flustered until I decided to stop trying to catch up or chase carefully likenesses. The result? You’ve probably guessed – indistinguishable from the general run of my zoom portraits, with the odd distinctly better moment, in both graphite texture and likeness hit rate.
Zoom drawing is back after a summer break
One pose lasts for the duration of one music track, then another model is called upon. An hour of such concentration, always against the clock, is intense . I used to get absolutely wrecked until I began to sit out the odd pose, to relax my shoulders and hands and give my eyes and mind a bit of recovery time.
Zoom portraits to music
Last drawingisfree_org session before a month-long summer break. Still a little rusty after a couple of months away from it, but starting to get my hand and eye in again.
One track, one pose, for one hour
One of the good things about being back home from wandering is joining in these Zoom sessions. Using music tracks to time the poses adds in atmosphere and a little variety to the pace, though it’s always pretty flat out, nothing running longer than about 5 minutes. After an hour of it you feel as though you’ve had a ferocious physical and mental workout. I think I’ve hit a wall in terms of speed, and perhaps accuracy, but catching a likeness is generally getting not exactly easier, but more reliable.
