A couple of months ago I enjoyed a taster session with a local art teacher, Gabriela Schutz, and pretty much decided to sign up for her autumn class on the spot. Today the first of these sessions came around and I rushed over to her studio, on the hottest September day for a century, armed with charcoal and a willingness to tackle whatever arrangement Gabriela came up with. As it happens there were a lot of items to consider in the centre of the studio and I picked an easel which appeared to offer a balanced viewpoint:
From this point Gabriela instructed us to begin with in charcoal essentially from the start - meaning no laying out in pencil - to encourage a sense of freedom and experimentation. I must admit that I found this a little challenging, as I like to organise the structure of my pictures, but I want to learn and so I set to work on the chair. Being nice and close this ended up anchoring my picture and creating a focus around which everything else revolved and could be related to. At this point Gabriela gave me a useful tip on drawing straight lines in charcoal which is to use the side of a decent length to create a line rather than attempting to draw it freehand. This advice definitely helped:
With my lines working well I spent some time fiddling with the ellipses of the pottery wheel before giving it up to work on different textures in the chair, wood and wheel itself. With the former just using some charcoal on its side seemed to fit but with the metal surface I switched to smoothing out the loose material with a cotton bud as this blends the charcoal very effectively. After this I was, fortunately, left with enough time to work on the background and create a more effective setting for the entire scene.
Overall I'm moderately pleased with the composition here in that the picture is quite balanced and seems to hang together despite (or maybe because of) the way in which I've distorted some of the angles. Clearly a few of the objects, such as the wheel, aren't truthfully represented but these regular shapes are just quite hard to get right in a material as indelicate as charcoal. So not too bad I guess and a welcome change from the small study stuff which I'm mostly restricted to at home.