BM Drawing from the collections: Detail and Definition

Most of last week was taken up with practising  for Faversham Choral Society's performance of Haydn's Creation on Saturday. It  was tremendously enjoyable to sing and the feedback  from the audience and choral  director was excellent: the altos ' captured the spirit of the piece and the B flat in the Heavens are Telling did not disappoint' . A break for a couple of weeks then a programme of Shakespeare inspired music.  Returning the score tonight, it took me over an hour to erase all the pencil markings...

 The following day was the last session 'Drawing from the collections' at the British Museum , concentrating  on detail and definition  through looking a  contemporary Japanese ceramic made of over 1000 feathered leaves. An interesting session - how to capture the intricacy  and delicacy without slavishly drawing everything.  Back to the 4B pencil of the first week, putting in rough shapes lightly then looking for  the dark areas ( above). Then  starting to define the edges of those dark areas and adding a bit of detail.

 Just as well  I  remembered to take photos as I go along as I should have left  the drawing at the stage it was above with some areas having a suggestion of detail and others blank

 But no - carried away by success of scribbling with new artists material (biro), I filled in  areas on the main drawing and of course these can't be erased. I'd forgotten how much I liked drawing with a biro - you can vary the mark much more than with my  usual 0.5  Profipen. Brought back memories of my experiments  inspired by the Boetti exhibition.

It's been an excellent course, well thought out and structured. I particularly enjoyed the session drawing the African pots.   As it was so successful, they're hoping to repeat it later in the year - I would highly recommend it . 

With evenings drawing out now, the sunset  while on the train home was moving East - these photos were taken at Rochester( capturing both the cathedral and the castle!)