Nature, up close and personal
An Alexander parrot helping with sketching
Lots of connections with nature this week. In a variety of lovely ways.
French Picnic. If you see the yellow cloth, it means a French Sketch picnic has taken place as indeed it did this week. Our traveling student was keen to polish up her sketch skills once again after a very disruptive year - we know what she means!!
Our warm up sketch was a few found items all designed to take you out of the madness of the world and into a gentle meditative and enjoyable few moments of sketching.
Something she was very keen to do was to learn how to create sketches from her own photos. (Others may be interested in this as well - let me know)
This was a nice challenging exercise so we started as we do, at the beginning.
Looking for the main shapes in the composition, what to leave out and what to make more of.
You’ll see from our sketches how well that little journey went and very happy she was.
Southern Highlands. What a gorgeous morning to be sketching beside the picture perfect Lake Alexandra. Such a beautiful spot and so much bird life strutting about and hearing the different birdsongs filling the air.
Everyone was settled and starting to sketch when a most glorious feathered creature decided to join the group. This was the Alexandrine Parakeet. A very friendly one at that. There she was, sitting on the sketching hand of our student! How can one possibly sketch with a rather large parrot sitting on your hand. Oh well. Connecting with nature is certainly fun.
Kingscliff. People and faces today. This is another subject which brings fear and trembling to students when its mentioned! No need. We start with a face proportion graph, and redo it to fully understand the way a face/head is put together.
Just for fun, before we started our class portraits, we did the continuous line (blind sketching) exercise of looking at each of your class mates in turn, and without looking at the page, sketch what you see. It’s always hilarious and nobody can be offended.
A great way to learn observation of your victims before sketching them.
Finally, each one modelled for a few minutes while everyone else did a likeness. What fun results, especially with watercolour splashed on to bring life to the pages.
Take a look below and enjoy the efforts of our students as we rapidly get towards the end of term. Enjoy.
