Sunday, September 5, 2010

Dr Sketchy's : Life drawing & burlesque!

Khandie Kissea in first session. 10 mins.
Over on Inklings, I read Catriona's post on Dr Sketchy and saw her fab drawings (check them out here). Two days later, feeling very nervous as I hate going to pubs alone, I signed up for an event at The Old Queen's Head, Islington. Yesterday, several weeks later, I was so nervous as I travelled up to London to attend. As Lisa advised in a post on Wanderlust Women's Travel Dreams, I had on my lipstick, dressed for success, and also carted up my A3 block of cartridge paper, various pens and pencils.

My table at breaktime, with 2nd G&T.
First stop, the bar for Dutch courage (why do we call it that?) then I chose a small table near a couple of friendly looking lads. Honestly, I don't know why I was nervous, as really it wasn't like going into a pub solo, but was joining a group of like-minded people for some drawing and fun, which the afternoon was.
Kiki drawn with eyes shut.
Peggy (Margaret Sterner Cox) would have liked the warm up as we had to do a blind-contour of the hostess Kiki Kaboom, who was a real character and directed us throughout the session. After the break we had to do a blind drawing of Kiki! After the warm up we then did some very short poses, and after each we had to hold up our results. The longest poses all afternoon were only 10 minutes and there where lots of challenges to add to our drawings, should we wish. I just drew what I saw - very unimaginatively.  

Displaying sketches - the brown paper is mine.
After the break, we had a burlesque-style performance by our model, which I did a few scribbles of. Then after drawing Kiki with our eyes-shut, Lieutenant Luke posed for us. At the end of the afternoon, after a joint pose between the two models, there were prizes for the best drawings. The prizes went mainly for originality. I felt all my drawings had been tight and too small for the paper - my most successful was my drawing done with my eyes shut.
Lieutenant Luke
Julie, Kiki, Khandie, & Luke.
Edit: I forgot the link for Dr Sketchy here.