More Colour, and Birds

I think I've finally coloured all of those drawings from the "Dr. Sketchy" modeling session. To find out what that was, you'll have to click the link below.

Early Bird without the Worm.

I coloured, in my usual technically-precise, painstaking way, this months-old sketch from one of the Dr. Sketchy sessions, so it counts as something new. The other things were drawn on my front step this morning.

I like getting up early, catching the sunlight out front before it gets too hot, drawing while the cat hangs out on a lower step, and the flies on the brick wall are only warming up, and haven't forced me to close the front door.

More Sketchiness

Still have drawings I dashed off with the brush pen from the Dr. Sketchy drawing session in my watercolour book. I'm posting them as I splash bits of colour on them.

Dr. Sketchy Redux

More from my Saturday at Dr. Sketchy. I was pretty tired after drawing frantically for three hours. Chatted with the model at the finish, and she was pretty tired after posing all that time! This was her first experience as a life model, I gathered. I think if you do it more often, you develop stamina which helps you hold some poses more comfortably over long intervals.


She's thinner than this. I guess I can say in defense I was making her R. Crumb-like.

One thing, when I'm working hard on a drawing, all sense of the model as a sex object goes out the window. It becomes more of a problem of geometry, trying to get all the shapes to work, and see the relation of things. Then afterwards, hopefully, hubba-hubba, but I don't think I'm habitually a "good girl" artist. Though certainly like drawing "cute."


Lots of women drawing in the audience. That's supposed to be a guy, lower centre, looking close at his paper.


She was totally smashing, and sitting next to me for a time. She didn't seem to mind my drawing her.

Don't know if I'm coming back right away. It was a little crowded, and I had to be a bit of a pain to find a good location (but I was late). Still, pretty good discipline for someone such as me, having to perfect my human figures. So, who knows?

Dr. Sketchy

Went to the Dr. Sketchy burlesque life drawing session the other day. Was lost, didn't have the address or name of the theatre, but saw this person undulating in a window.

She pointed me in the right direction, which happened to be across the street. Her, and her male counterpart (whom you can see in my flickr set) happened to be an entirely unrelated burlesque-style event. (UDPDATE: her name, from her card, is Mlle. Oui Oui Encore, and you can look up her and her partner at Blue Light Burlesque.)

I climbed the stairs, paid my ten dollars. What greeted me looked like a regular drawing class, except much more crowded. Took one of the last folding chairs, and saw an empty space at the front by the wall, where no one had went because someone had set up an elaborate computer with drawing tablet, and it was hard to get past the wires.

Managed it, and after warming up, was able to do a few drawings.

That's me in the right hand corner, from the big mirror. This was usually a rehearsal studio.



This is our model, Miss Lexie Von Hagen. [link to her myspace page, but don't say I didn't warn you!]



It was years since I've been in a room drawing a model. Tried out lots of different drawing implements. This is pencil with black gouache and a Chinese brush:


And my trusty brush pen, with watercolour washes. Here she looks more pissed off than she was. These were the short poses (5 minutes or less):


I was as interested in the crowd as I was in the model. when not drawing her, or she shifted to a lousy angle, I sketched the people around her.

More drawings tomorrow! If you're impatient, the whole thing is in the flickr set, or on facebook.