2nd entry for May 4, 2014

These are a 15-minute study, a 20-minute one and a 12-minute one. All done with water-soluble graphite on 18 x 24" sheets of Canson Montval watercolour paper. During the 20-minute one my drawing board upended when the chair it was propped against slid out too far. Water spilled around, and resulted in a bunch of drips below Sidney's upper torso. Which in hindsight I'm kind of liking, though the way it was generated was a bit too jarring to make a habit of.

2nd entry for Aug 1, 2010

These were 15-minute poses. In ways, I was additionally disappointed that these were the studies spilled on because I felt they were quite strong ones. But in retrospect, the fact that they are quite well-realised makes them able to withstand the interference.

1st entry for Aug 1, 2010

These were a couple of 10-minute poses that S- did on the Sunday morning. These were the topmost images in the pile that was inundated by liquid detergent - albeit in a slightly interesting way...

1st entry for July 25, 2010

On this Sunday night I was installing some of my pieces at a really lovely interdisciplinary art space called Majlis. You can find out about the improvisational mixes of poetry, music and dance happening in their "Figure of Speech" series here.
After that was done, I got out for the second half of the Sunday evening drawing session. D- was working. The drawing was going okay - these are a couple of 1-minute gestures and a 15-minute head study.

I had these sheets of newsprint set aside to photograph, along with a couple of other sessions til I got around to setting up the camera to batch-photograph them. Before I could, a mishap occurred where a bottle of liquid laundry detergent came undone in a bag atop them, and leaked all over the pile they were in, a fact I discovered about 10 hours after the soap started seeping. The photos here are shot the day after that.

The topmost image is a full 24" x 36" sheet with detergent stains. The others were cropped. I halfway like the random `noise' that the detergent imparted, so these almost qualify as `happy accidents', and it is in that spirit that I post these `as is'.

On a chemical/conservational note, I am curious about how much a colourless, unscented Tide detergent affected the colour of the newsprint, turning it various shades of orange and ochre almost immediately. A similar thing happened when I recently tried pasting some newsprint into a school project using acrylic matte medium - the paper turned a yellowish-green where the medium touched it. I don't recall newsprint being that affected by wet media in the past. Anyone able to shed any light on why that colour change happens?