An artful weekend...

In August  I spent another fantastic day with Rachel Clark at her studio, we had a great model (Lesley) and as usual the atmosphere was calm and relaxed and very conducive to productive drawing.
As before we started with some 5 minute and 1 minute drawings which I found difficult to begin with but Rachel is so patient and such a good teacher and helped me through the tough times! We worked alot on visualising the body as boxes and using the charcoal stick to align features horizontally and vertically to enable us to get the body in proportion. Here are a few of my early attempts...

After break we did two half hour drawings, using the same techniques but just refining our pictures a little - the first was ok but I was happier with my second half hour picture.

Finally, after lunch we spent the whole afternoon drawing one particular pose trying to get better at all the things we had been taught. I'm reasonably happy with this though I didn't get the face quite right. I'm glad I managed to get some of the pattern in the fabric she was sitting on
Here's my final piece...

On Sunday I decided I should try and practise my skills and I headed to the British Museum to find a statue to draw, I found 'Hermes' and it was quite entertaining to sit and draw while tourists milled around me. The closer I was to finishing the more interest they took in my picture and one or two actually photographed it!!LOL - Sadly I haven't photographed it yet - if I get a chance to photograph it this weekend then I'll blog it.

After the British Museum I decided I had done enough drawing for one day and so I headed over to Buckingham Palace and did the tour around, which, at the time included the Wedding Dress, shoes, cake etc. It was lovely to see the dress close up and to find out about how they stitched cutouts from 6 different pieces of lace onto it. Buckingham Palace state rooms were beautiful and I loved all of the works of art (some very historic important pictures and sculptures).
Following the weekend I used an old book and lots of Graphic 45 papers to make a whole altered book to remember my visit to Buckingham Palace, it featured in the ATDML September Design Team Gallery...

Here are some of the inside pages...