Drawings December, January

When I joined EDM, sometime in September, I started drawing this hand from a photo (by Raymond Meier in Vogue magazine) using the pencil I normally went for, 2H, and slowly building it up in layers. But at the same time I did the quick drawing of the presser feet with an HB and left this one unfinished. I much prefer the softer pencils now but I wanted to finish this and stop thinking about it. After a couple of months using HBs, the hard pencils felt like steel pins!

As I did the challenges, I lost interest in drawing from photos, surprising myself as I'd always been quite defensive about them up until then. Recently, I've been using digital photos which I quite like. They seem to fall somewhere in between as they are more luminous than photos on paper. Drawing from life has become my first preference though. There seems to be a prejudice against artists who use photos, as if it's 'cheating' so I feel satisfied now that I can draw with and without them and therefore justified if I do use them. Probably doesn't sound like much, but it did a lot for my confidence.





















These are Alex's trainers, looking nice and new. They looked nothing like this a few weeks ago when they finally got binned! I wasn't getting so much drawing done at this time as we had decided to leave Kuwait. Mark had holiday time to use up and Paul and Alex had finished at the school as it wasn't possible to stay on till the last day or even part of the term - Kuwait loves it's red tape!




















I originally posted the trainers in stages as they progressed.