Chantal-Andrée Samson

Kingston Prize

admin — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 16:23:42 +0000

My drawing of Kevin, Steady Gaze, is a finalist in the Kingston Prize for Canadian Portraiture! The exhibit will travel to three cities and will be in Toronto at the Institute for Contemporary Culture, Royal Ontario Museum, November 10, 2011 – January 29, 2012.

Steady Gaze
charcoal on paper
13×19

Recent drawings

admin — Tue, 03 May 2011 20:03:49 +0000

The top one is from Sunday’s 3h pose at the TSA, which I haven’t attended in a long time. I was a bit rusty! The rest of the drawings vary from 5 to 15 min.

Recent short poses

admin — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 13:30:38 +0000

The male model was Denis, but I can’t remember the name of the woman (new model). Poses’ lengths vary between 10-20 minutes.

Weekend gesture drawings

admin — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 15:31:40 +0000

From the open life drawing held at OCAD and the TSA this weekend. The models were Serenity and Robyn and poses vary between 1, 5, 15 and 20 minutes.

TSA Sunday: Amanda

admin — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 00:53:44 +0000

Pose time: 10 min, 15 min, 18 min

Saturday at OCAD: Pat

admin — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 21:24:07 +0000

I’m back from my February break (I had a great time hiking in Gatineau Park and skating on the Rideau Canal in Ottawa), and it’s time to get back to work. I attended the open life drawing at OCAD this morning. Pat was the model, and poses range from 10 to 20 minutes.

Recent life drawing

admin — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 21:59:06 +0000

Getting back into it

admin — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 14:37:50 +0000

I went to OCAD for the open life drawing yesterday. I am quite rusty, having drawn but little during the past term. I had a good time nonetheless. Lengths vary from 1 minute to 20 minutes.

John B. Aird Gallery 2011 Drawing Exhibition

admin — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 19:23:19 +0000

I just received the news that my drawing, Steady Gaze, was selected for the 12th annual juried exhibition of drawings being held at the John B. Aird Gallery in February.

Steady Gaze
charcoal on paper
13×19

Master Class with Brian Smith

admin — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 01:38:14 +0000

This Fall, I was in Brian Smith‘s Master Class in Life Drawing. Here are some of the highlights of the course.

In the first drawing, we added a drift to enhance the gesture in the contour drawing. In the second one, the drift was drawn first and the contour drawing was placed over top. We didn’t know what the gesture would be when drawing the drift. I was lucky that the model took a pose that went well with my orange wave. Then the model danced and we drew as she danced.

The first drawing is a memory exercise. The model, Ed, took a 10 min pose in a separate room. We had to walk to the room, study the pose, walk back to our easel and draw as much as we could remember. We could do this as many times as we wanted over the 10 min. I did pretty well! In the other two we played with ratios in composition, where we would only draw a certain percentage of the model filling a certain percentage of the background.

This was interesting for me: we had to design and simplify the figure. I had mixed results, but here are the two best.

For these drawings, we had to fragment the figure, zooming in to crop the composition in some unusual way. I played with line and value, taking advantage of these exercises to explore the skin folds and muscle contours of Murray’s form.