In my sketchbook - life drawing

It's been probably about a year since I last went to a life drawing class! I received a wonderful book for Christmas from my parents titled Mastering The Art of Drawing & Painting the Human Figure by Sarah Hoggett and Vincent Milne.

I thought I'd take some of the tricks I learned from the book and put them in practice at a local life drawing class at Blim. Here's a few of the better sketches from the session.

The model had a beautiful figure and I really like the strength of the poses she made, but I had the most trouble drawing the hands and head...I will definitely need to go back and practice some more!
Eventually, I'm planning on creating a painting, or a series of paintings with the nude figure stylized, on a light coloured background - here is my first go at it on a 10x10 canvas board. Not quite there yet!

In my sketchbook

Hey its Friday and I'm stretching canvas in my studio, getting a bit distracted...

Lately I've been sketching all sorts of things in my sketchbook, so I'd thought I'd share some of them here.

I'm still fascinated by trees and their bare branches... here is one sketch i did recently. Instead of solid colour I used crosshatching lines to fill it in. I did this randomly but I think next time I will try to follow the texture of the tree.

I've seen a lot of bird illustrations around, I think they're really cute so I had to have a go at one myself. It took me a number of versions to get to this simplified form of an Australian Blue bird (that's me missing the constant chirp of birds and parrots that is prominent all over Australia.) After a few sketches I created a final colour version with my shellac based inks and brush on paper (this time just plain white drawing paper).

I'm also working on creating some Christmas illustrations. Instead of buying cards I thought I'd make them myself this year for family and friends, and that way I will build up a portfolio of images for this season, to submit to greeting card publishers for next year. This one is inspired by my boyfriend Marc-Andre who is an elf this Christmas!

Gotta go and get back into it now - enjoy!