Painting Printmaking Illustration

Chriswoodartist : The Month

By chriswoodartist / November 12, 2013 / architecture, art, art courses, computers, drawing, graphics, landscape, life drawing, trees, weather / 2 comments

Copyright http://www.chriswoodartist.com All rights reserved 2013

Copyright http://www.chriswoodartist.com All rights reserved 2013

Copyright http://www.chriswoodartist.com All rights reserved 2013

Copyright http://www.chriswoodartist.com All rights reserved 2013

Copyright http://www.chriswoodartist.com All rights reserved 2013

Since the demise of my trusty laptop I’ve been getting to grips with an ipad. I bought a tablet as an interim measure whilst I decided what to replace my defunct Mac Book Pro with and I’m still sitting firmly on the fence. The ipad is wonderful but there are some things that I find difficult and grappling with a word processor on a tablet is a new experience. Using a PC or laptop I had become lazy, forever refining and tweaking what I had written. I find CUTTING AND PASTING on an ipad tricky and there’s also no desktop to drag and drop onto ! So when doing any serious writing I borrow my long suffering wife’s laptop. I have PAGES app on the ipad and was used to using WORD on my old machine – needless to say the laptop doesn’t have WORD or PAGES – another dilemma !

Over the last 7 weeks I’ve have been pretty busy teaching at the University and life has been a little fraught (no change there). I also currently teach two evening classes and am writing the specs for another. I’ll rekindle my plein-air drawing and painting masterclasses spring 2014. If that wasn’t enough I’m writing a book alongside continuing my practice as a fine artist – so semi-retirement will have to wait !

At the University, I have been demonstrating life drawing to animation and computer games students and we have had a couple of brilliant models who have been very patient and inspired everyone to produce some excellent drawings. Not all of the students come from creative backgrounds and it was a baptism of fire for the “programmers” but they too are beginning to “SEE” and have made great strides with their work. Several of my groups are continuing with life drawing and the others are now turning their attention to ENVIRONMENTS, COMPOSITION & COLOUR and this has been an exciting diversion. Yesterday was spent drawing and photographing the interior and exterior of the Eldon Building which houses “CREATIVE and CULTURAL INDUSTRIES”. More of this later !

Life drawing can be a daunting experience, particularly if you’ve not drawn much in the past. In one of my groups only 2 out of 15 students had done art at GCSE and none had any creative A level – so its a steep learning curve. I usually start my classes off with expressive gestural drawing, on a big scale (A1:841 x 594 mm)and standing up at an easel. Standing, rather than sitting, seems a rude awakening for many – but as I tell them when they start to wilt after 15 minutes – I stand for 8 hours each day !

In the UK we have had some strong gales recently and not too far from us a friend had a mini tornado sending a mature elm tree crashing through her sitting room window. Her 14 foot trampoline also went on an adventure and flew over a nine foot high fence ! We got off lightly with only a couple of casualties – a Willow Tree and a couple of large branches from a eucalyptus! So I now have plenty of timber for some winter open-fires.