Coming Soon....

Three years ago, I migrated my blog activity to Tumblr, and I liked a few things about it.
The layout looked swanky, and it seemed to garner good response. Lately though, activity has dropped off, and I found out why.
I make drawings of human bodies, They are not explicitly sexual, nor are they contextualized that way. Nevertheless, Tumblr started tagging my drawings as `sensitive' NSFW material. With their setup, when that is the case, the only way for a viewer to access my work is by setting up a Tumblr account and toggling off Tumblr's 'safe search' mode to allow for viewing `adult' content. Needless to say, that has not encouraged much casual viewership.
I get that there is a lot of explicit porn, and erotic imagery on a platform like Tumblr. But I do not believe that figurative imagery along the lines that I do - like work by Lucian Freud, Jenny Saville, Alice Neel or even Rembrandt - crosses the NSFW line. their detection algorithms seem too blunt an instrument, and appeal process too limited.

So, for ease of access, I'm moving back to Blogspot.

Three years ago, I decided that 10,000 images was a good `tombstone' mass of work to explore in here. Now, time to add some fresh stuff.

Thanks as always for coming in to visit.

.. and if you want to see what Tumblr is protecting you from, visit http://thomasdrawn.tumblr.com/

Summary Report: Toned Papers, Part 1

Toned Papers, Part 1:

For some time I have been exploring alternatives to drawing on newsprint. I found that for my sensibilities, drawing with Conte crayon on large sheets of newsprint had an ideal texture for direct figure drawing. But the newsprint has no longevity. 

Earlier this year I began experimenting with adding washes of ink to better quality paper to draw on. This came in  conjunction with finding an oil-base pencil, Cretacolor Nero, whose marks I liked: they are less coarse than Conte and `smoother’ than charcoals.

The early ones I’ve been doing used more muted greys with small amounts of colour mixed in, echoing the newsprint look that I have a fondness for. Also, black marks look less stark when there is some underlying midtone, rather than white paper.

Summary Report: Toned Papers, Part 2

Toned Papers, Part 2:

More recently I've been exploring how a base tone washed on paper contributes to the drawing I’m doing. Starting March/April of this year (2016), I began using washes of more vivid hues. 

I found a paper I like, Stonehenge light weight, and began using Daler Rowney FW acrylic ink for the colour washes. The drawing is done with Cretacolour Nero oil-base pencils.

There are certain limitations. I stretch the paper to wash colour on, but it’s thin enough that working in water media while drawing would buckle the surface a lot. The colour layer can come off with heavier erasing, so I try to keep erasures to a minimum.

It’s having promising results so far, and allows for a few directions of exploration, making images of people. I hope you are enjoying these as well- I’m having a good time making them. You can follow the progress of this on my tumblr.

Recap: 2006 - 2011, the newsprint years

Newsprint Drawings:

The human form never ceases to fascinate me, and I have always enjoyed making images of people’s bodies.

Newsprint does not have great archival value, but I really enjoy it as a surface to draw on. In fact, I’d rate it as my favourite surface to draw on. In the mid-2000′s  I gave over a lot of time to what I think of as `direct drawing’: no under-sketching, minimal planning and no erasure. I was using 24″ x 26″ sheets of newsprint, with Conte Crayon. 

I felt at the time like it was the most honest working process, and there was an energy, a confidence and a vitality to the drawings. These are a few of them.  The big sheets of paper made for very physical drawing, and I found the `grain’ of the shading strokes worked very well for shadow on skin. 

Using any material over an extended period of time, the speed and confidence of handling ramps up. By 2010, I was able to get good strong images done in 10 - 15 minutes, and 25 minutes or up got into overworking territory. (There is no rule anywhere that drawing has to be a speed process, but fast drawing has a certain urgency embedded in it, and short time spans allow people to do a lot more with their bodies.) 

At the time, I did not feel I could ethically sell work like these due to newsprint’s rate of decay. (But I am re-thinking just how vulnerable it is, especially if mounted on a good support - for sure, it would go through colour changes) . But by the end of 2010, I resolved to find smaller, not-too-costly media that would allow for what I liked about the newsprint drawings to happen on a better-quality surface. that investigation has led through a lot of different materials and papers that I’ve tried since then.

There is a certain special quality and luminance of shading to Conte crayon on newsprint, and the nuance of it gets lost  in the translation to other papers. I look back at all these  Conte/newsprint drawings and studies as a bit of a `golden age’ for me - they were so easy and fun to do, and people enjoyed seeing them. But looking back through my archive, many weren’t that strong after all.

If you look at posts here from Oct 2012 on back,, you can judge for yourself. Out of four or five thousand studies, maybe 20% are the stronger ones, at least in hindsight.

1st entry for Oct 18, 2015

It was a chilly Sunday morning in the Jam Factory space. Polyna was working that day. I decided to work more loosely, as I've been focusing on crisp extended contours for a while.  These are some 1-minute, 2-minute and 3-minute studies done with Pitt pens, and three 5-minute studies below done with oil-based pencil.
It seems that for me, drawing from life 3 or more times in a week yields the fastest, most responsive work. That's when I feel most in my `zone' of drawing from life. Of late, a couple of times a week seems to be more the average. My drawing has been feeling just that bit more awkward, something I definitely felt drawing Addi and Jacki. So this session was a good one to loosen up and give more exercise to spontaneity of touch.
Also, I have been conscious for quite a while of the effect of wanting to generate `postable' works to share here and on Tumblr.  It's a good motivator, but also inclines me to opt for approaches with dependable outcomes on a steady basis. I have lots of those here now, and it's getting time to get less output-oriented ...

2nd entry for Aug 28, 2015

Calibrating Expectations 2:
These are 1-minute and 2-minute studies. I usually want to try to set down the specifics of the person I'm drawing, but there's only so much that can be done in short time spans. For a minute and up I tend to shift from scribbly `pure' gestures into `rapid contour' line studies. There's no time to fret about proportions, so i just set things down and restate if necessary and there's still time. Two minutes and up gives time to pay a little bit of attention to faces and hair, but too much and the pose is over.
These are a medium-point Pitt pen on 18 x 24" sheets of Canson Recycled Sketch paper.

1st entry for Aug 28, 2015

Calibrating expectations:  On the Friday I went to ARC Studio, and Petra was working. These are 30-second studies.
I had only brought along what turned out to be a nearly dry calligraphy point marker, so it was not at all able to flow at the rate needed for rapid gestural scribbling. So I used a piece of 6B woodless graphite instead for these.
In thirty seconds there is really not the time to try for any specific details, and trying to set them down is an exercise in frustration. So the emphasis here is on being fast and responsive, and trying to get the `feel' of the poses, and a bit of a sense of the particular person's general shapes.
They are a really good workout.  these are all 18 x 24" sheets of some generic bond paper.

2nd entry for Aug 2, 2015

Not every drawing day is a good one. These are four 5-minute studies above, and two 10-minute ones below. It was not a good day for proportions staying in control, and I was having to work more slowly and redraw contours a lot to get them to work with  Pat's forms. The 5's are done with no preliminary marks, which for me makes the drawing especially high-focus as an activity, and more stressy in the moment - at least when things aren't flowing. With ink there's no retraction of marks, so every moment hold the potential for collapse if my attention or hand wavers.
10 minutes and up I have time enough to do some looser sketching, to block in key forms in pencil. I try to keep that to 2-3 minutes, or there's no time left. Loose pencil marks are open-ended, non-stressy and help catch the most egregious proportion problems. But losing the feeling of drawing on the edge of a cliff means the ink lines are different when aided by a pencil sketch; they can lose some of their tension and `bite' as marks.
An idea that interests me currently is what is the least amount of pencil sketch that would support a line drawing the most, and eat the least time in the bargain. Drawing things twice over is redundant; what is the most organic effective shorthand for me? What info do I absolutely need, and what can I fill in with a more detailed line?