I am making steady progress on improving the website. A double pronged attack, half on sorting out the ‘real’ work, the archived pieces of paper (just sorting paintings of butterflies  has taken ages). Now looking again at the presentation of the images. I’ve started to use 2 gallery viewing methods… the scrolling one as on the small coppers & fritillaries pages (and relief – birds). I wanted to find a way of adding reference numbers to the images which I haven’t succeeded with so far with the scroll gallery but it is working fine with the lightbox type gallery which I ‘m showing lower down on the pages.

Feeling that I’m getting more information down on my sheets of the kind that would be useful for me to do any follow up work. Always trying to pinpoint the areas where I feel hazy… The sheets end up being a bit cluttered and messy but they are functional.  Beginnings of feeling that I’m looking through the kind of 2D ‘surface’ of the eye type looking to feeling more what is happening on the other side.

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I’d gone into the class hoping to start by writing descriptions of postures but it just seemed too odd. Similarly the idea of doing memory drawing just too much of a leap at the moment.
The first image here was the last of the evening and the mans right arm partly hidden by his head and neck was where I felt I was getting somewhere… anticipating where it would start in the shoulder block and emerge being clasped by the other hand… that meant that I could start and end lines in a different way.

The whole business of being able to break lines at will … feeling them continue in the empty space and then pick them up again seems critical to making the drawing lively.

I’m gradually learning my way around my website again and looking at trickling down postings from here to facebook & twitter, figuring that it’ll be useful to at least understand how those things work.  Also posting my first ever video (of the mural that I was making earlier in the year for Berks, Bucks & Oxon Wildlife Trust at their Woolley Firs Education Centre.
As yet it is slow progress, plagued by intermittent service from hosting service godaddy… Don’t like to whinge but I figure that if I talk about their poor service here it is some kind of goad to improve things. Bad reviews must be a thorn in the side for any company, now that they are so visible on the internet.

Since the blitz I had on web work back in the spring I’ve had little time to resume the sorting out of my ‘galleries’ of images. I’ve now made a start…jumping in with paintings of insects (mainly butterflies and dragonflies). A lot of the time it seems like it is one step forward followed by one back with this computer related/internet stuff. My service provider godaddy has acknowledged that there is a problem with their hosting of my site and that they are working on it but with no time frame for fixing it…. pretty poor service after I had thought that they were so much better than the previous people (easily.co.uk) who were in my opinion useless (certainly for getting a wordpress site off the ground).
Meanwhile the ‘plugin’ that I was using for uploading images (nextgen gallery) has been taken over by a company called ‘photocrati’… thought that might make for more problems but so far the service seems great.
The ‘slideshow’ here is of sketches from 2009 that I hadn’t previously uploaded and that I was using to test the system.

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A bit scrappier than last week, or that’s how it felt. Still making some kind of progress though. Taking only black crayons of different sizes. Trying to focus on making sure I was aware of how the model was in contact with the ground and then grappling with areas where I feel more hazy. In particular in this session looking at shoulders, hard to see what happens with scapulae, the shoulder bulk and then the rise of neck into the back of the head. Because the models are mainly women the differences in the way they ‘control’ their hair has been a focus… noticing changes of directions in flow because of bands, hair clips and pins…. Would be good to use the binoculars but might seem out of place in this context.

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October 17, 2012 –  contact form now working fine but I was having problems up to about a 2 weeks ago. So if you did write and got no reply please try again. Thanks.

NB. the new scroll type galleries that I’ve installed don’t seem to give captions in internet explorer…If that is your preferred browser, please try with the galleries on the lower half of the page.

Final drawings of the evening and felt like I was homing in on the kind of information I would need for making follow up work. My studio is awash with fallout from laying the new kitchen floor but maybe I’ll tidy it enough to at least make a monoprint.

My resolution to try and make a drawing of some sort each day not really working out… although I am making diagrams of flooring to clarify the laying down of the kitchen floor…. not inclined to upload those for the blog. When I’ve been trying to teach drawing recently though I was advocating the making of diagrams as a different way in to drawing….
Susan found this moth in our lean to greenhouse.

The last of what I think was 7 x 15 minute poses. Gradually finding my feet with the life drawing again…looking and drawing at the same time is very different to the way I work with the birds…where I look for ages, stop and then start drawing.
One reason is that it is quite hard to just sit and look in a life class… looking intently at another human being, especially if they are naked is somehow  too intense and feels odd.
All of that seems to make it harder to think about what I’m trying to draw…little headspace remains. Maybe a good thing.

A rare field sketching outing. Focussing on one of the bays at local reservoir. Sense of autumn ripening… lots of birds moving in the hedgerow alongside the north-south lane. The cover so dense and their movements so quick it was hard to see what was what. Blackcaps (males with both grey and brown backs… not sure of the significance of that?), chaffinches, tits, phylloscopus warblers… a day for sketching not for identification though.
From the hide a large flock of black-headed gulls.. probably resting after their efforts in a newly cut or muckspread field. Deciding to focus on them… the water movement and their bobbing and flighting. I’d spent some time working with this theme before and never got to any kind of resolution… coots and mute swans on the periphery.
Distracted by birdwatchers looking for lesser scaup and even more by 4 hobbies that were whizzing around the foot of the bay. 3 youngsters and an adult.  Skimming low over the bistort at the waters edge and then up over reeds and willows.
The vegetation on the edge providing more id challenges… common spiked rush with some small black pupae type insects. Marsh woundwort and a very toothed tall plant that I’ve never got round to sorting out.
In the meadow more dark bush crickets than I’ve ever seen before. Lots of migrant hawkers… fewer darters and common damselflies.