I havent been doing much life drawing of late, but last week I turned up to a session taking my acrylics and square brushes.
These sketches were done fairly rapidly. I was after a loose blocky style.
I am still uncertain as to how I proceed with life drawing. As you can see here the poses are very stilted and the subjects flooded with light from all angles.
I do like the pressure and demands these sessions provide, though they give little time for consideration and development. There’s too much focus on speed and I wonder the effect it has on some of the attendees including myself.
Other life paintings are available for sale on my website: grahammcquadefineart.com
graham mcquade 
i must admit graham, i attended a portrait class back end of last year using charcoal, the guy sat still for about 12 mins then started to fidget about and never really got back into the position i had started with,so from there it was guess work. I am not a fan of being rushed into slapping paint or any medium around, they say it leads to spontainious work, it just leads toa bloody mess with me, the thing is with your paintings,although you could say they are studies, and good ones too, as you dont have a photo to help out it is difficult to progress with any of them.
I think it would be better to spend more time with one model rather than rush through 3 of them, just saying..
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Yeah, people do move. I generally outline hands and feet until I am ready to do them in detail, as they stray the most.
There are times when I want to do fast sketches, but you can do that by moving around the studio. This is my beef: doing fast sketches imposes it on everyone. Long poses allow both fast sketches and detailed work and so opens up a variety of approaches. It is an argument you hear from me a lot at these sessions. In fact I got an extension on the first pose as I had to do a bit of correction – hence the black background and I didnt have enough time to get anywhere near resolution – fortunately a few others wanted more time also.
As for the other poses that was all the time I had – the session just moved on or broke up for tea.
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Beautiful work, Graham. I can imagine how challenging it would be to paint so quickly, you have so much talent!
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Thanks Tiffany. The time pressures do speed you up, but sometimes you need time to think, otherwise you end up doing the same things over and over.
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