Life Drawing in Bristol

      I have recently changed jobs which means I have a lot more evenings free and I have used this time to try and make the most of living in Bristol and trying out new things! The last time I did any life drawing was in my second year of university 4 years ago and even normal drawing I am very out of practise. 

      I found that there were circus themed life drawing sessions at The Island in the city centre where they have a circus training space. As someone who takes aerial circus classes already I was really excited to try this and me and my friend Holly decided to go and flex our slightly underused drawing muscles.

      We went to two of the three sessions, each started with fairly short poses using rope, silks or trapeze. I was intrigued to see what types of poses we would do knowing that even posing for photos on circus equipment hurts a lot as there are many narrow pressure points and uncomfortable grips. I liked the way the models wrapped the equipment around them and used it to create interesting wraps and shapes for us to draw. 

      These sessions were untutored, which was nice because I am very out of practise, everyone just got on with their own thing. People were using all different materials, some just with sketchbooks some with large sheets of paper. There was no pressure with people walking around looking at your work it just felt nice to make marks and shapes and not worry about if something worked or not. 

      The people who ran the circus classes also have a regular spot at Cafe Kino on Gloucester road on a Monday evening. This week we decided to check it out.

We had two models, the one at the start was pregnant which was really interesting and beautiful to draw. I tend to prefer drawing women because they have such fabulous curves (sorry men).

      This session was a little different from the circus ones because we were able to draw longer poses, the two below were 20 and 40 minutes which gave a little more time to focus on adding more detail and working on the shapes. I will forever hate drawing hands, feet and faces, but maybe if I go to a few more sessions this will improve over time. 

      If you want to try out the monday life drawing sessions you can follow their facebook page here. It runs 6-8pm and costs £5 for the two hours with some basic materials available if you don't have your own. The circus sessions may be running again soon if you just keep an eye on their facebook page.

Christmas Fayre Poster - Hand Drawn Type

I have seen a lot of beautiful posters about recently using hand drawn type mixed with illustration to give a more "hand made" style to the events they are advertising. This works especially well when it comes to advertising craft fayres as the whole premise behind these events is buying into hand crafted goods. I find hand drawn typography to be a lot more charming and interesting to look at than standard fonts. 

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I have wanted to make a poster like this for a while now so I jumped at the opportunity to help out a friend who is running a christmas craft fayre in Chippenham to raise money for a local charity on 21st December. Check out the event page here.

I thought I would go into a bit about my process when it comes to hand drawn type. I usually loosely sketch out a composition of what my piece of work will look like. I am no graphics/layout expert but generally just looking at the shapes of different letters and words and seeing how they fit around each other helps when working out a composition.

To come up with the different type styles I usually use dafont.com where I will look at a variety of fonts before choosing one and experimenting with drawing it out in my own style with different drawing implements. It usually ends up with the text being a hybrid of the chosen font and my own style due to the different tools I use. 

One tip I have for hand drawn type is to experiment a lot with your tools. I prefer my designs to have different line weights and textures as I think it looks richer and more interesting. This is a small selection of what I use for type:

 Left to right: Berol Italic Pen, Rotring Mechanical pencil, 3 Rotring Rapidograph pens of various weight, Graphite pencil, Graphite stick, Alex Wonder Pen (alternative to brush pens, click for how to make), Calligraphy Fountain Pen. 

Graphite sticks for example have a really great grainy texture and chunky ones can easily be manipulated to create different thicknesses of line.

These presents are drawn with 3 different thicknesses of fineliner.

For this I drew out my design roughly in the chosen fonts in pencil before going over with various types of pen/graphite pencils. Here is the scan of the finished design:

I then went into Photoshop to tweak the composition, retouch because am not the neatest of artists, and add colour and layers of texture. Here is the final result:

I enjoyed this project, hoping I can do more like this in the future! Feel free to share your own hand drawn type projects, I love to see what people are working on :)

The Sketchbook project

I feel like I haven't posted enough here recently. This is mainly due to it being christmas and me having no access to a scanner or much internet!

I generally put pictures of drawings I like on instagram as soon as I take them, give me a follow over there if you are interested @josiethejump. 

Over christmas I decided to do the Sketchbook Project as something to do aside from my uni work for a bit of fun. I chose to draw peoples dreams because the things people come up with are so much more strange and random than what I could come up with just making things up!

I ended up using a different style to what I have been recently. I kept with using black line and the odd bit of brush pen with quink in, but I used a graphite pencil in different ways to add shading and add a bit more dimension to the pictures compared with the way I usually just use flat shapes. 

Here is a few to start off, let me know what you think, I love reading peoples comments! 

I had a dream a polar bear chased me through my house and when I came downstairs he was eating the laces from my favourite shoes.

I had a dream I was pregnant with my friends baby.

I had a dream I dropped my new phone off a bridge into a river.

new pens and pencils :)

Me and Holly weren't getting enough done today so we went shopping for stationary! wooop. I had some vouchers for helping decorate a window for uni so I went a bit crazy. Got two types of mechanical pencils, one lot were in a pack of 5 with all different patterns including robots!!! And I got a new fountain pen which is really nice to draw with and means I don't have to carry ink everywhere which is good :) I also got turquoise, purple and pink ink cartridges because they looked like fun!

Oh yeah and heres some more birds incase you hadn't seen enough already :p

jess