Tag: drawing

Crafty King Alfred

King Alfred Paper Puppet

Have I mentioned lately that I love my job? I run the Toddler Time sessions at the Museum of English Rural Life (every Friday during term time, 10-11 & 1-2), and part of that is to come up with an activity every week – preferably one that’s linked to the museum’s collections in some way.

This is a sneak preview of Friday’s activity – a paper puppet of King Alfred to colour in and cut out. You fasten all the pieces together with split pins, in case you were wondering. One of the highlights of the museum is a six foot straw sculpture of the king in question, so I thought it would be nice to make a little something in his honour.

I drew a quick pencil sketch, and had planned to recreate it in Illustrator. But the scanner won’t speak to my computer, I couldn’t get a photograph that was clear enough to be useful, and so I decided to go back and do things the old fashioned way. I traced my sketch onto a new piece of paper, drew over it with two different thicknesses of pen, and rubbed out the pencil lines. On Friday I’ll fit all the pieces onto A5 paper, then use the photocopier to enlarge it onto A4 card.

Sometimes it’s so much easier to do things the old fashioned way!

[edit] If you’d like to see some of the puppets that the toddlers made, I took some photos. Can you tell which is the one I made myself?

A bit of scribbling.

Last week, at lunchtime, Channel 4 was showing an art programme, which was half an hour of life drawing. I found out about it in time to record four out of the five programmes, so yesterday evening I sat and scribbled along with episode two.
Life Drawing

It turns out that there’s a Flickr group where you can post your pictures. It seems as though some people have either re-watched or paused the programmes – unless they’re much faster at drawing than I am. I think that’s a good idea, as it gives you the chance to do a different kind of drawing than you could achieve in just thirty minutes.

Pausing the programme would definitely be a good idea for episode three. The model seemed to choose a particularly uncomfortable pose, and she couldn’t sit still! This is not an especially endearing quality in a life model.

Mind you, when I was at art college we had one model who invariably fell asleep if she was in anything even vaguely approaching a reclining pose. The great quandary at the end of the lesson was always how best to wake her up without touching her, and without frightening her to death by shouting.

I’d been thinking for a while about going to my local life drawing classes, just to get a bit of practice. It turns out that it’s on the same night as clog dancing, so I’m very glad that I have four of these programmes recorded.

Considering that I haven’t done any life drawing for five or six years, I think this little sketch came out okay.