Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Canadian Life Drawing - One


Here I am up in New Brunswick, Canada for a month. The other day I was riding over to Amherst, NS for some shopping, by way of the lovely back roads through Baie Verte and Tidnish, NS, and I found the only Tidnish tourist bureau is now an artist's cooperative gallery! I stopped in to take a look, and found they also are offereing classes there - including a Monday night Life Drawing open studio. $10 a session gets you two hours, from 7:15-9:15 PM. So I decided to go! Alas it was not conducive to pastel painting. There was an artist facilitator, and he had the model (a young man) just doing lots of 30-second and 5-minute and 10-minute poses. I was certainly not able to use pastels in that time frame, and didn't want to use my nice Art Spectrum paper either.

So I had to use the small 5x7 sketch pad I had stuffed in my bag, working much smaller than I usually prefer. But it was interesting and a fun experience, and at the end there was a 20-minute pose, so I decided to dare my pastels and Art Spectrum 9x12 paper and the above is the result. Not very great of course. With only 20 minutes I had to be super hasty. To do something like this reasonable justice would require at least 45 minutes for me, and hopefully at least an hour. And I don't think I'm going to get that with these sessions!

But I still enjoyed it, and will plan to go on Monday evenings during the month I'm up here. They are also trying to get a group together to do plein air, and I expressed interest in that as well. We shall see.

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