Coming soon is Birmingham’s first Zine Festival. It’s a grassroots event that developed out of a bunch of people loving zines and wanting to DO something. Often this ends up with a lot of chatting and nothing happens, but [..drum roll..] the Birmingham Zine Festival is going ahead on 10th – 12th September! Exciting! Except I’m at a wedding on the 11th so will almost certainly miss it all. Boo. Good news is, I’ll still be present:
Being determined to have SOMETHING to do with the Festival (due to my obsessions with books, zines, print, and anything DIY-ey in Birmingham) I signed up for the Mail Art Exhibition and was sent this blank postcard. It’s been hung next to my desk for a few weeks and time was ticking by and without feeling at ALL inspired I took it along to a life drawing class that Kirsty and I attended on Sunday – and this was the result!
The mac run an awesome array of creative classes and Team Frilly had been planning on forcing ourselves to make art for ourselves one way or another – as work always seems to take priority/take over. Shutting ourselves in a room full of studious artists and a naked person seemed like a good way to enforce the spending of time creatively!
Drawing for the first time in a very long time felt awkward. How to hold the pencil? (loosely, and not like writing) Should I use charcoal? (I forgot to bring any anyway!) Is everyone using colour? (everyone had different tools – I worked in monochrome) Did I remember my rubber? (no I didn’t - annoying!) Will the model mind if I plant myself right at his feet? (he didn’t mind – didn’t even bat an eyelid!)
Everyone worked very differently from one another. Some just painted. Some worked for the whole day on one image. Some explored line and tone and shading. Some concentrated on detail. I worked on a range of papers, on one pose and the close up study of his face. Generally I feel I’ve remembered measuring and checking angles – but I struggled on how to kick start myself which using drawing exercises might have helped with.
I want to go along to more classes like these, but felt a little bit frustrated by the lack of actual tuition. I understand that in a one-off session it’s more about maximising your drawing time – so now I’m starting to look at night classes that concentrate on developing drawing skills.
Kirsty wants to make every Friday an ‘art day’ where we have to concentrate on making things – but I’ve sadly had to remind her that we still have bills to pay/workshops to run/young people to signpost/admin to complete/blog posts to write/emails to reply to/invoices to post/the list is ENDLESS! So for now, Fridays will just be Fridays - but if anything changes I will be sure to write in gleeful tones all about it.