Friday 27 February 2009

Sans Eyes, Avec Serif

I mentioned that my art project is taking a Shakespearean turn. To be precise, I'm trying to incorporate the "seven ages of man", from Jaques' monologue in "As You Like It". In the studio today I spent several hours measuring lines and writing the passage out in ink, in what I hoped would be a characterful script. Many were the yelps of frustration at irredeemable fluffs but the finished page is not without charm. As with life-drawing, the pursuit of calligraphic perfection demands many hours.

Thursday 26 February 2009

Life Drawing

Weekly life drawing sessions started today at college. That meant about twenty of us standing at easels in a room on the top floor, next to the vasty fine arts studio *. The tutor gave some instruction - including limbering up physically at the start - and the model gave us poses of increasing duration - from thirty seconds to forty minutes, over two and a half hours.

That length of time is helpful and I'm looking forward to seeing the difference in my style at the end of the four weeks. I got all the angles and proportions wrong some of the time but the tutor liked the way that I draw.

Here is my final piece of the session.


* My illustration project is heading in a Shakespearean direction.

Monday 23 February 2009

Enclosures

I'm learning about archaeological surveying and the interpretation of aerial photographs. At the moment I think I understand it. The latest assignment will test that. I enjoyed the reading for last week, An archaeologist's guide to classification of cropmarks and soilmarks by Jonathan Edis, David MacLeod & Robert Bewley (Antiquity 63 (1989) 112-26): it features a good number of diagrams and drawings, the most pleasing being the following three, illustrating types of enclosure.