Jas and Kitty

I've had two private sessions with the lovely Jasmine Glover over the last couple of weeks. In the second session we were joined by Jas's friend Kitty, who wanted to try modelling and my friend Alexa who wanted to do some drawing. Both sessions were relaxed and fun affairs and here are my best scribblings from them.

A Brace of Beauties

Yesterday I was privileged to draw two of the best of our local models here in the damp city of Brighton and Hove. I'm trying to build up a number of watercolour or charcoal drawings to choose
from for the up and coming exhibition in Worthing so to that end I had the gorgeous and very talented Jasmine Glover round to my flat to pose for Alexa and me in the afternoon then I went to my regular class in the evening at SCAC where our model was the luminously lovely Lucy Victoria Sponge who is also very talented. I'm still exploring the theme of the shadow that we all carry with us. Freud calls it the unconcious mind which also encompasses the collective unconcious and is usually a very negative influence that has to be confronted and accepted whereas Jung things the shadow contains positive elements like the spark of creativity which (as we artists know) can be richly rewarding. A bit deep for as jobbing cartoonist but that's what I'm (subconciously) trying to put across. Anyway, here are the best from yesterday. Jasmine is on top with Lucy under her. Er... I think I could have put that better. I need a lie down.

Shadey ladies

I've been asked to join about a dozen other artists in an exhibition of life drawings to appear in Worthing in March and to that end I wanted to try out a new unified style instead of my usual eclectic mish-mash. I've recently seen two artists' work that has inspired me. Russell Patterson, and american illustrator from the 20s and 30s used a lot of areas of black in his images and modern artist Steve Huston does fabulous work with charcoal. So I decided to try my hand at monochrome images in watercolour and charcoal and these are what I've come up with so far. I'm quite pleased with the way it's looking and the large dark shadows are meant to symbolise the oppressive dark side of our personality or the emotional baggage that we carry around and the naked figure stands for vulnerabilty.
I'm hoping to create some sort of emotional response in the viewer rather than just creating pretty pictures of naked people. I don't think I'm quite there yet but I'm going to keep going and see where it leads me.