4th entry for July 25, 2013

These are a 15-minute and a  20-minute study,  and what worked out to a 25-minute one at bottom. The top one is on 18 x 24 Canson Recycled Sketch paper and the lower two are on 18 x 24" sheets of Canson Mixed Media paper. All are done with a range of Copic warm gray markers. I reworked the top two later, adding background elements and trying to subtly add 10% or so of additional head size, as the head/body ratio was noticeably off. I lost some freshness and immediacy on Zia's face, but they work better overall.
While I was working that night I was being fussy about music again - at least internally. There was a laptop playing some bop-ish jazz music and funk, and some of it was not working with my own rhythms. Music is so hit-and-miss for me that way. If I can synch my rhythm of mark-making to it, it's great; if not it jams up how I'm moving, distracts me and robs focus. That night I found that a lot of what I was hearing got into that latter territory. Each time a jazz outfit would settle into a nice groove, some musician would interject with an attention-getting note or solo. I'd love that live, but it wasn't working in the drawing session.
Funnily, in the Dr Sketchy's, Toons on Tap or Keyhole Sessions where music was loud and a planned part of the package, I rolled with it much easier. But that was mostly club-type music, most of which I am familiar with and tends to have less dissonance.
Maybe it's just some jazz. Maybe it's more alcohol-friendly music and I work best in a caffeinated state. I feel it's there because someone felt it ought to be, some traditional accoutrement rather than for any currently valid reason. In life drawing, my musical pretensions lean more to Eno, Enya and Baroque music than arty jazz, - just as cliched in my own way.
Silence is often best for me when life drawing - internally I've got enough to keep on top of in very short spans of time, plus keeping ego (good and bad) at bay, without an added layer of sound to process, and I'm not very good at ignoring it if it's there.

The Articulations space was very nice to work in and well worth visiting.  They happen every two weeks, and aim to get an equal mix of male/female models, which is good, and uncommon these days. The people drawing were nice, too. Most of them were ready to pack up early, so I got a bonus 10 minutes of the last pose in in quiet communing with Zia, which I enjoyed a lot (after silencing the laptop). Zia's work was really good, as always.
We learned after that the studio is in a former basement barber shop, and is just adjacent to a former funeral home's embalming room. Now that would have been a wonderfully macabre ambience to work in. Fire up the Gregorian chants, please!