Square Studies

Last week’s Life Book lesson was a fun tutorial by Kristin Dudish.  It essentially made a kind of game out of close observation and small studies of parts of an image that would build up to a whole.  It involved using a source image to copy so I chose to use a vintage photograph to steer clear of the whole copyright thing.  We were encouraged to use different media in each square.  However, I was working on this piece late at night and in front of a movie and I quite frankly felt like relaxing and being a bit lazy so I just used different colours of watercolour pencil activated with a water brush.

I have not done such close observational drawing since I left Scotland.  It was something I used to do at life drawing class ever so often – really study an ear or the fingers of one hand – but after almost three years I thought I would be more rusty than I proved to be.  It was a really fun exercise and an enjoyable way to translate what can be a challenging skill into something easily digestible and entertaining.  I think I might even take this approach again in my art journal as useful practice.  Maybe my kids would have fun trying it too.