Life Drawing at Cardiff

Yesterday my group were scheduled to meet at the Cardiff train station at 10am for life drawing with Matthew. This was a bit of a mission as it meant getting up at 6:50am, showering, getting ready, catching the 8:15am bus to Newport, stopping off at Zara's in Opal, and heading to Newport's train station at around 9am to catch a 9:30am train to Cardiff. AND, when we got there, Zara and I couldn't use our student railcards because you can only use them after 10am!!!

But fortunately, Zara, Claire and I did get to Cardiff on time and met with Matthew and only 3 out of 12 other students for life drawing. As we walked over to where our drawing would take place (Bute Park), several students were ringing Matthew saying they were lost etc, and we found three more classmates at the entrance to the park. In the end, there were about 9 of us, but it wasn't a very good turn-out.

Although it was quite a trek to the park, it was absolutely HUGE. It must have taken us 30-40 minutes to walk from one end to the other, and even then we didn't go to the very end of the park! It was a really lovely location however, the autumn leaves were falling off the trees and there were loads of wildlife in the river. There was some sunshine and it wasn't too cold either.

 

So in the end it was definitely worth all the trouble to get there on time and the drawing experience was very rewarding! (Especially since we got to draw and feed the horseys!) =)

Next week I have to do a 4-6 hour self-portrait and a whole bunch of small gesture drawings like the sketches above. It's quite a lot of work considering everything else we have to do, which brings me to our next animation project.

Today our lecture with James involved splitting into pairs and showing/discussing each other's images that we collected over the past week. I was up all last night doing a power point for my pictures, so it was a relief that I got to show and talk about them to Rob. It was a pretty in-depth talk!

After this we were each given a different set of keywords for our next animation, which is not allowed to be figurative and has to show something in more of an abstract sense. We were given these cards to choose from which in turn had several words or phrases on them, most of them 'doing' words.

My card contained the following...

• Looking through a keyhole
• Wringing out a cloth
• Playing the piano

Obviously, the piano one would be the easiest of the three to express without actually drawing the action, particularly as you can use piano music to help. I'm feeling quite drawn to the keyhole option though, simply because I think I could be quite creative with it. I have until next week to come up with and start my idea (the actual deadline for this being in two weeks from now) so we'll see how it goes!

Apart from that, today has been rather grim and it hasn't stopped pouring it down. Now I'm going to be off for dinner and a movie!
Ta ta for now!
Love Gemma xxx