Feel like my recent weeks have been taken over by life drawing. I joined the UAL life drawing club because I was worried that I’d miss out on important anatomy and gesture training if I didn’t get to draw in person. I go on Mondays and Sundays now, in addition to Wednesday storytelling life drawing with Mary-Clare and Thursday nights for the animator’s life drawing. This past week I also went to a pop-up life drawing event at Jazzbourne, a super classy and intimate jazz club.

That’s probably too much life drawing. I’m wary of developing the artist’s version of “fingeritis”, a thing that happens to jazz pianists where your fingers go on autopilot and play the same riffs and licks by default, your soloing becoming stale. I see mistakes in my life drawing that have become default to me (I always draw girls too muscular and chonky) and it’s a fight against my brain and my hand!

I think it’s really useful to do external life drawing in addition to animation life drawing, in which the poses are 30 seconds to 3 minutes long only.

The 10-20 minute ones are great too, because I get to slow down and really look at anatomy.

Tried to participate in Gouachetober this year, since those paints I got back in 2018 are slowly but surely drying up…

The challenge was to do a painting for every day of the month, which is a noble goal but completely impossible when you’re trying to (finally) move into an unfurnished apartment. At least it was less painful to be on hold on the phone with water/electricity/gas companies when I was painting at the same time.

I didn’t even do a painting every two days! but I think the challenge was still overall effective because I left it feeling less scared of breaking out the gouache. And I’m sure it was helpful in developing my eye for colour, composition, light and shadow, which are still useful for animation!

Went to the Rodin Exhibition yesterday (10th Oct) at the Tate. Under-25 year olds got 5£ tickets but my student ticket was only a pound off the full price, so it was 17£ for me! Make it make sense.

Anyway the exhibit itself was great. It was fantastic to see all those sculptures up close (my cute friend here for scale) and get a sense of Rodin’s deep knowledge of anatomy, as well as where he chose to exaggerate!

I’ve always loved to draw dancers but stopped doing it recently in order to do more life drawing, and this inspired me to get back into it.

I wandered through the exhibition sketching anything that caught my eye. Particularly striking were these busts of a Japanese lady – Rodin had used her again and again as a model (and she does have a compelling face) and basically stiffed her on payment. Do better, art community! Or rather just do better, white men!