Brooklyn blues, new mixed media painting

Happy 2013!

I'm back from a bit of a Blogger break, can't believe its been so long since my last post.

Anyway here is the finished mixed media painting that my last post showed the start of:

Brooklyn Blues

Mixed Media on canvas

80x60cm

There was a fair bit of collage and layering of textures to get to this point.  There's lots of subtle relevant inclusions as well that hopefully will mean there's a lot of looking longevity!  My research on New York style building made me realise I'd picked architecture with LOTS of windows, phew!

 This painting now has a new home in my brother's music room and thankfully he was really happy with the way it turned out

Ryan

Classical style drawings

Have been continuing to practice my clssical drawing techniques, here's some recent examples:

This one is from life and took about 1hr 15mins. It utilises grey paper, graphite and heightened by white chalk. There no smudging, only directional hatching to indicate form. This is a technique favoured by many of the old masters.

This one was done yesterday at the National Galleries of Scotland. There was an 'Easel Sketching in the Gallery' event that I took part in. Basically there was a model and easels set-up for volunteers to draw. Took about 20mins, but was tough because there was quite a crowd (about 30-40) bustling around watching you work!! It uses willow charcoal and white chalk on a warm grey paper. Reasonably happy with my effort considering I wasn't warmed up and was under pressure!

Finally I went to the back stair of the gallery where there are many classical Roman busts (Mix of marble and plaster casts). Picked this one to do a sketch off in my journal, using just a new mechanical pencil (HB) I bought. I really liked the fact that this pencil was always sharp! There was quite an audience again as visitors walked past, many stopped to see what I was doing and asked a few quesions. Quite a challenging afternoon!

Ryan

Cast study

Cast study
pencil on paper

At last I can post pictures again thanks to a new digital camera! No life classes at the moment as the Whitespace studio is being used as one of the many venues in the Edinburgh festival. Been working on this to keep my drawing studies up

Ryan

Mairen portrait study

Mairen

10x12 inches

Pencil on paper

A portrait study working on my drawing . Tried to keep to a classical drawing technique of hatching here without any smudging. All done free-hand but took time -about 3-4 hours

Ryan