Best foot forwards! Both charcoal pencil on gesso-prepped cartridge. I thought having to abandon close vision glasses for this (flicking back and forth between even the short distance foot-to-sketchpad is tricky) might be problematic but actually it seems to lead to looser drawings as there’s no way to get tangled up in detail when you can’t see detail at close range. These sketches are preparatory, non-specific practice pieces not, as far as I see at this stage, a formal exercise. But given my lack of models, I can at least use myself and make a start on various limbs and appendages. I saw some men fishing from the river bank earlier though, so I might pop down there tomorrow (or next weekend, if they’re Sunday anglers) and ask if I can draw them. In my experience, these are people who sit very still for a very long time.

I should probably stick with feet, I’ve seriously scared myself with this one! The idea was to focus on my nose but noses come as a set with other features and it leaked badly. I’d like to say drawing without reading glasses is responsible for the result but maybe I’m in denial about looking 90! I may have got a handle on the elements of ‘nose’ as a series of shapes though – tube, circle, and triangles.

Charcoal pencil on plain cartridge.

29th July. Found a YouTube tutorial on drawing noses and this has really helped. Basically, they begin as small aliens.

I’ve used charcoal pencil and pastel with a putty rubber. I like the blending capacity of these media, and they way it’s possible to be loose and achieve volume without fudging the shape.

These are not copies and the semi-profile image is obviously off kilter. I’m quite pleased with the noses though.

These are HB pencil, stump, and Derwent eraser. I was going for gnarly when I made the tree at the bottom!

Different video; these are men’s noses, not cutsie ones.

The one at the top definitely looks more like a tree than anatomical feature but I’m quite pleased with the other two. Charcoal pencil, HB pencil, stump, and Derwent eraser.

This is another fictional nose done in pastel, charcoal pencil, and Derwent eraser. Close up, I get bogged down in the individual shapes – there’s a shell and a rock, a cave, and a mountain there – but at a distance and on-screen I can see a big old nose. Nothing cute about this piece of olfactory apparatus! Tomorrow, maybe mouths or eyes.

31st July and another couple of mouths. Also a rather unsatisfactory part-profile nose. These are charcoal pencil, primarily, with pastel in the second drawing. I seem to be resorting to Henry Moore’s structural circles – like wire frames for sculptures – that he uses with his sheep drawings.

See also

Part 4, project 4, exercise 1 – structure, body parts

Part 4, project 4, exercise 1 – structure, body parts: Drawing hands

Part 4, project 4, Figure and form – finding my feet