Drawing in the Dying Heat 

This pastel drawing ‘Model Session – 29-06-24 – 1’ again depicts this beautiful young woman I already drew last April. A bit of a realist experiment, blending out planes on grainy Hahnemühle Ingres paper. It was our last live model session we had this season in community center ‘De Blauwe Tram’. A big advantage was we need not worry about room temperatures. Surely a hot day and contrary to last April we didn’t had to put the heater on for the model. Disadvantage was the temperature indoors with 10 adults sketching in an enclosed space makes you sweat like a pig. Luckily for our model she didn’t wear any clothing so we did all the hard work. 

A Relaxed Session 

We had our model lie down on a couple of pillows for a relaxed session. As part of the organizing team I’m pretty much used to having the last choice. All the right seats around the model were taken. So I was left with taking my place diametrically to her front. Fortunately for me there were some interesting diagonales, round shapes, verticals and horizontals to exploit. However, contrary to last April’s sessions this time I wasn’t able to finish the session with a satisfactory result. There was too much light shining down on her. Therefor, the vast amount of white pastel seemed a bit lumpy to me when I got back home. This is how it goes. Sometimes you feel lucky and complete a drawing within one session. Other times you have to complete it back home. 

A Bit of Refurbishing 

Especially the foreshortening of the head receding a bit to the back proved to be a tall order. I had it plausible right more or less but wasn’t satisfied yet. In the past I made plenty of pastel drawings I didn’t publish to date. Merely sketches really but this one had potential so the day after I refurbished it a bit. The trick was to blend out tonal transitions more so the result would be so ‘chalky’. Her head I kept rather sketchy but I’m convinced I got the foreshortening right.

Pastel drawing on Hahnemühle Dürer Ingres-Bütten Night Blue paper (48 x 62,5 x 0.1 cm)

Artist: Corné Akkers

Price: € 1,500.00

Sales info: info@corneakkers.com