Posted by Annalee Beer on Jun 13, 2018 in Blog | 4 comments

Last night I went to my first life-drawing session. It was with Ali Fran of The Stable Art And Design at Urban Paradise Gallery. I had a lovely time. Alison was a lovely host, and the gallery is a pretty great place for this sort of thing, in the break I had a chat with various people about the art on display at the gallery. Drawing is not my strength as an artist, and drawing figures is something else again. Last year for a while I maintained a daily drawing practice, where I would draw flowers. Flowers are much easier to draw than humans are, because our eye is less trained to notice issues. If a petal is too large or slightly askew it can look like it was meant to be that way. When a you do the same thing with a persons eye, it drastically changes the reading of your image.

I’ve never been particularly adept at drawing people, but I would say that my flower drawing practice definitely helped me here, approaching issues of where to start, and how to look at my subject, issues of where intuitively to place lines – as I looked at the model and less at my paper, to begin with. It was nice to get in a zone, I wouldn’t say it is as meditative as my beading practice, but, I could see myself using drawing practice to meditate.

There is another life-drawing session tomorrow night, its costumed with a 60s theme. I’m going to go. I think regularly going to life-drawing sessions will help my development as an artist.