Entry for Oct 7, 2012

(Looking to for an introduction to  life drawing soon?  I'm pleased to announce that I'm offering a special 6-week Life Drawing Basics course at the Toronto School of Art, running Tuesday mornings from October 30 to December 4th. You can get full details on registering from info@tsa-at.ca)

On the Sunday morning, Simla was working. From the top, these are a 5-minutestudy, a 10-minute one,  two 15-minutes and a 20-minute study. All are done with hard compressed charcoal on 18 x 24" sheets of Canson Recycled Sketch paper (except the top one - it is on 18 x 24 bond paper.)

I had an idea I tried exploring a little bit that day, what I thought of as a `Pygmalion' drawing, where a more fleshed-out shading would appear on top of a more sketchy scaffold of lines, like it was rising into focus.  This as opposed to trying to shade the whole figure, so these are more purposefully incomplete than usual. It's one of the possible negotiations of the limited time that a person posing for a short time affords: hasty drawings, partial figures,  fragments, montages of several of these together, among other potential strategies.