LIFE MODELS FOR FREE

Now that I have your attention...You can see living models in the streets of any town. This post is about my method of sketching them. Let me tell you something about the way I work when I am drawing people I see in the street. There you have the opportunity to study how people stand, hold their shopping etc.You can get plenty of prectice in looking-andunderstanding.

MATERIALS
I often use small, very unobtrusive pieces of paper, it is a good way to use scraps of good quality paper which can be kept tucked inside a  folded, book like piece of card. That is all you need.I usually use two coloured pencil stubs. Perhaps grey and black or brown and black with the lighter colour for a quick outline. My favourite coloured pencils are Faber- Castell Polychromos and for street sketching I cut  pencils into halves or smaller so that can easily hold two different stubs in the palm of my hand.Stubs are less visible. These pencils have very strong leads and they do not smudge easily.

I do sometimes draw into sketchbooks if that is all I have with me.But often, quite frequently, in fact, your model will move or just go away. So there is an argument for using only a cheap sketchbook.
At the moment I am using an out of date Moleskine diary. It isn't that I have any great liking for Moleskine but this was going cheap in a charity shop.As you can see it is tiny.One of the things I liked about it was the fact that the print is grey-and often minute so it is easier to see the drawing.

DRAWING PEOPLE IN TOWN-WHERE TO FIND SUBJECTS
Two places which come to mind are public transport and bus queues.If you are sitting on a bus you will probably have the back of someone's head  directly in front of you.Perhaps he wears a cap, or her hair is cascading all over the place. They cannot see you and you are not staring at them in any kind of intimidating way.It is all good drawing practice.If the person is across the aisle and one seat in front of you they will probably be visible in lost profile. Again they cannot see you out of the corner of their eye so you are not being intrusive.

On the bus

old Moleskine diary-in the bus queue and on the bus,

Another location which you might find useful is somewhere near a group of cashpoints. Again, you get a back view but there is the challenge-which I like-of getting something down quickly.

Apart from this, in town, especially where people meet in town centres there will often be a quiet place
where you can stand which is not in anyone's way and from which you can observe.

At the cashpoint

ATTITUDE TO DRAWING
You have a challenge in drawing someone at a cash point. Enjoy it and try to get something essential down on your pad.If you are drawing someone on this situation they cannot observe you. But what if you want to draw someone full face. In a formal sitting the artist is allowed to scrutinize the subject thoroughly. In drawing someone you do not know it is different. Staring could well be distressing to the subject.You do not want to do that and in general I would personally scan the subject in a general way.

on the bus

If you are on a bus and there is someone a couple of seats down who is facing you then you will be looking in that direction anyway. You have to scan in my opinion because that is the best way to get a general impression. This type of drawing situation is not for those who are obsessed with detail.

In a cafe-Durham

I cannot give you any legal advice on the subject.I have drawn people in public places in the UK for many years and only one person has ever commented.A young woman had come out of her office to smoke a cigarette and I was standing near a bus queue and  tried to draw her. She noticed and asked if I was in fact  drawing her . I said that I was and that I was an artist and often drew people out of doors. She was happy to look at my sketchbook and didn't really mind.
You can see more recent cafe drawings here.

Constable's Painting Room

In 1813  John Constable had moved into his house in Charlotte Street in London. He was in the process of redecorating his painting room. Note that he says "painting room" rather than studio. Constable writes in a letter to to describe how he wants the room to be painted. And what colour did he choose? White, the all purpose choice of today's artist? Or something else? Constable chose a purple brown colour.Constable was working in his own home. This was a normal practice at the time. He did not have a separate dedicated workshop such as many artists now have. One  can only guess at how he would react to the idea of a white cell such as many  artists accept/demand. I think that he would have found this depressing and emotionally chilly--and of a colour which does not suit his work.

...my front room where I paint shall be done with a sort of purple brown from the floor to the ceiling-not spareing even the doors or doorposts for white is disagreable to a painters Eyes-near  pictures-

(Letter to Maria Bicknell, 30 June, 1813 .Capitals, spelling etc are JC's own)


So Constable chose to work in a relatively low toned room. He specifically mentions that the woodwork-the door surrounds for example, are painted the same colour as the walls. They are not picked out in white or some contrasting colour.

He does not give his reasoning for this choice of colour.He surely thought that this colour scheme would not be too gloomy. Can we reconstruct/guess what these reasons might be? He may have thought that it would complement the silvery  colour schemes found often in his own work.And at the least it would not be distracting. The paintings would surely appear more luminous against this relatively low key background.White skirting boards and woodwork would have caught the eye.He surely wanted the flickering effects of his painterly touch to have no competition.

Constable's text quoted in : Constable the Art of Nature, The Tate Gallery, 1971. The organisers were L Parris and C Shields

COTMAN THROUGH THE CAMERA LUCIDA

John Sell Cotman as drawn by John Varley with a camera lucida.
Dated 1810.Yale Center for British Art

Anthony Vandyck Copley Fielding. Also drawn with the camera lucida. Same date and provenance
as the Cotman.

Artists do sometimes use mechanical devices in their work. One gadget  is the camera lucida which is a device that can be used in portraiture. Here are two drawings made by the British watercolourist John Varley. The he first bears an inscription which confirms that it was made with the cameras lucida. The other is so similar in style that  if the one was created with the device then the other must be too. Interestingly enought the subjects are both distinguished British watercolourists J S Cotman and Anthony Vandyck Copley Fielding. Both works are in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art.
The Cotman dawing in particular proves that male hairstyles are relatively unchanging.

The inscription on the front of the Cotman states "Johnny Cotman of Norwich",and on the back,"Mr John Sinclair Cotman/Done with the Camera Lucida/June 1810. (Varley gets Cotman's middle name wrong, it was Sell.) And it also appears that the camera lucida used was most likely that invented about this time by John Varley's brother Cornelius who certainly had strong scientific interests.For further information look here . And for information regarding scientific aspects try this site of the American Philosophical Society.Cornelius called his apparatus a Patent Graphic Telescope. He was an artist but worked mostly as a maker of scientific instruments.

The camera lucida is basically a prism fixed above a drawing board.To use it the artist normally sits at a table and looks into a prism at eye level. Then the artist traces what is seen in the prism -which appears to be on the paper which sits on the baseboard.

The quality of line is also a giveaway which suggest a kind of tracing or copying activity. If you look at the neckwear of the sitters you will see the clear and slightly perfunctory quality of line which is common in traced work.You can see a similar simplification in some of the drawings which Rodin made when he copied a work by holding it up against a pane of glass to allow tracing onto another sheet.

OX-GALL FOR WATERCOLOURS

Yes, that is just what it is, another traditional feature of the British watercolour tradition. And yes, in the past you could have sent someone round to the slaughterhouse to obtain enough to last a lifetime.It is also used by people who make marbled paper. But apart from this gory facet, why is it of use to a watercolourist?

If you use quality watercolour paper you will often find that it is difficult to cover the paper, difficult to spread your wash because the colour will not take and balls up into patches no matter what you do. Watercolour papers are often hard-sized so that the colour stays on the surface and maintains its brilliance.This is what ox-gall helps with. It is a water tension breaker or wetting agent.You can add some to your painting water and see what the results you get.It may only need a few drops.Available from reputable art stores, you don't need to go to the slaughterhouse.

CLOUD STUDIES-A TUTORIAL

Here are the stages in the making of a small watercolour exercise done to practise the visualisation of clouds, one of the hardest of subjects for an artist to imagine.Done on a sheet of watercolour paper with a slightly rough surface. Sometimes I lift  the dried watercolour with a wet brush-no colour.The blue shapes eventually define the white shapes of the clouds.

Haphazard dabs of very liquid blue watercolour

Dark blue starts to define clouds.Orange brown to represent land/horizon

Green band to represent another patch of land. it dries in a puddle with a hard edge. Some blending of sky at lower left.

Further work on the sky near the horizon  where the clouds are blurred by rubbing with brush loaded with clean water.

More blurring of clouds on the horizon and upper right with clean water. Land areas strengthened.

Trees are introduced and the horizon is strengthened.Clouds are blurred with a brush loaded with clean water

Trees are strengthened and some light ochre is added to the shadow sides of the clouds.The clouds are redefined a little at lower right.