Week seven and eight (of ten) from my Royal Drawing School Drawing:Ink and Watercolour evening course.

November 2, 2022

Week 7 – Stephanie Forrest

In this class we had a model, and were trying to capture motion and rhythm in our drawings. We tried to detach from getting a particular outcome, and instead be open to experimentation.

This was probably the most intense class of the whole course – we made so many drawings in such a short time, very challenging and very exciting :)

First drawing above – Top drawing was created with the left and right hand at once. Bottom one was about starting with a splatter and finishing it off with a nibbed ink pen.

Second drawing – A frieze drawing – quickly capturing the movements of the model.

Third and fourth drawing – Overlapping drawings – capturing the movement of the model

We looked at examples from art history of the representation of dance through line work, including ancient Egyptian relief sculptures and ancient Cambodian frieze drawings (first image). Then we drew very quickly following different brush stroke instructions for each pose…then super dooper fast sketches!

Sequential drawings – going for the overall flow of the movements.

Week eight from my Royal Drawing School Drawing:Ink and Watercolour evening course.

November 9, 2022

Week 8 – Stephanie Forrest

In this class we explored transparency and layering, working with random prompts to help us access our unconscious mind.

We started with the creation of a concertina book, taking three minutes to draw for every page. Sketches included swimming underwater, being in an upside down room, puddles of water on a pavement… with a concertina book you can fold over the pages and make different combinations of images.

How to make a Dadaist poem –

  • pick a random book and transcribe two random sentences from it
  • write a description of each of the drawings on one strip of paper each
  • combine them all and let them drop onto the table
  • see if that’s a poem!

We looked at artists who were inspired by Dadaism and how introducing randomness/accidents/surprises into the work can bring it to new places.

How do we let our non conscious processing spark ideas for us?

We looked at the layered work of Francis Picabia.

palimpsest = a manuscript or piece of writing material on which later writing has been superimposed on 

We made some sketches of our past work from the course then redrew them again as layers – for each new layer we got a new instruction – eg”gliding” washes; grey watercolour; one bold ‘wringing’ dark line, etc… I enjoyed working quickly and building up layers without thinking. The result is something I wouldn’t have normally made but it means something to me. Not thinking works well for me!

This was last class with Steph, but still two more to go with Max.

You can see the whole 10 classes on my instagram, story highlights RDS Ink 1 and 2.