Michael Gage

A difficult standing pose for our model at today's life drawing session.



Both pencil on paper, approx A3.

Red is difficult to print on top of. I printed this layer in grey (a mix of cobalt blue and burnt sienna, with white).

Red printed over the previous blue layer. The red ink (T.N. Lawrence's scarlet) is very transparent. If you add white in an attempt to increase the opacity, the red turns to pink. I adding lots (nearly 50:50) of warm yellow ink, which increased the opacity without shifting the colour.



The lamp will have darker ink printed on it later, but I didn't want the red on those parts because I was worried that the slightest misregistration would show up too much. So I used a mask to hide these parts from the red on this layer.

Straight on with the next print...

Cobalt blue mixed with lots of white for the first layer. Actually, it's the second layer: first, I printed the square of lino in white with a tiny bit of yellow; I find it easier to print the coloured layers onto an existing ink layer than onto plain paper.

Final stage: Darker-still mix of red and cobalt blue over the previous layers to complete the print.



Number 27. Four stage reduction linocut, 10 x 10 cm.

This is one of the houses in the North Laines of Brighton: endless rows of small, late Victorian, urban housing, most of which have been carefully restored. There's lots of inspiration here.

Third stage: I cut away the sky, the window panes, and some of the pavement, and then printed the block in a mixture of red and cobalt blue.



Oops. Not sure I like the way that this is going. Some of the cutting of the details is clumsy. The windows are wobbly.

As compensation, here's something else in the same colours.

It's a rabbit.


In a flowerpot.

Second layer: I cut away what I want to remain pink, and then printed blue over the pink. I was worried that the blue printed over the pink in the sky area would turn lilac, but luckily the blue was opaque enough to hide the pink. It's a mixture of cobalt blue and white, both of which are relatively opaque.

A new print starts.

A nice twist to our usual life drawing poses: the model was dressed in trenchcoat and hat, giving a Forties' detective feel.






This is the same pose as the first drawing, drawn immediately after it, but the model seems to have slumped a bit -- or I got the angles wrong.




Another pose. Lots of linework with a hard pencil and a soft pencil; smudging to create tone; and then lifting out the lights with a putty rubber.

It makes an interesting change to draw a clothed model: there's a suggestion of a story; a reason why the model is there.

Each pencil on paper, approx A3.

It's been quiet around here later. Too busy working! Normal service has now been resumed.

One of my photographs has just appeared in the National Trust guide to White Horse Hill. Here's the cover (not my photo):


My photo's inside.


It's in the middle, near the bottom. Their caption is "Sheep on the ramparts" (of Uffington Castle). Here's the original: