NaNo mid-month report

NaNoWriMo has been going well - I passed the 50K threshold last week, on 11th November, and 75K yesterday. I've gone down with a bad cold, which I am blaming for the deathless prose with which I ended a marathon typing session on Sunday night: "It was very involving and she felt very involved." You read it here first. In fact, you won't read it anywhere else as I fixed it the next morning.

My story is much more tightly plotted than last year's, and being set in contemporary Britain there is less scope for vague hand-waving about society, technology, or other potential setting problems. I have been pleased to discover that my characters can still turn around and surprise me by wandering off where I least expect it, meeting new people, and having ideas of their own.

One of the people I have persuaded to sign up is going great guns and appears to be enjoying the experience, finding it freeing and fun. It has been awesome, I can't recommend it highly enough to anyone interested in exploring their creativity or freeing up their writing.

Nearly NaNo

NaNoWriMo starts at midnight tomorrow. I'm ready (extra stocks of tea laid on, plot points, character profiles, imagery and random incidents to sprinkle in as necessary) and excited!

I'm also working on a small panel painting, a Madonna and Child, where I've reinterpreted the traditional imagery by having a newborn baby rather than the typical toddler. Drying times being what they are(n't) at this time of year, I'm getting an hour or so done and then having to wait a day or two. Given that I want to reproduce this as a Christmas card, and the craft fair season is almost upon us, I wish it would hurry up. Having thousands of words a day to write should distract me from watching paint dry, anyway.

art project

Ingredients: take one eighteenth century church, some volunteers who have not painted before, fifty+ square metres of canvas, and a lot of paint.



Marinate over a couple of weekends in church halls and unused gallery areas, gradually adding layers of primer and then paint.






Sew on straps and attach to balcony railings.



Light candles (after applying flame retardant).




Why? It's for a new informal worship evening in a very traditional church - we wanted the place to look very different for the night.

Novel finished

Last week I finished the novel I have been working on here and there since March 2008, taking several months off at a time to take fiction courses and do other things. This is a first draft, and finally weighed in at 164K words, so clearly a lot more than it's likely to be if it's ever tidied up and re-drafted. (It is only a third of the length of War and Peace, but then War and Peace is better written.)

It was a bit of a surprise - I wrote the ending of the main plot, knowing I had a couple of sub-plots to tie up, but then went back and finished those on the same day as I suddenly knew what I wanted to do. I've mostly celebrated by telling people IRL.

A bit of an anticlimax followed - I took a few days off writing, partly because a massive art project was coming to completion too, then carried on with my research for NaNo. I am now ready for the NaNo writing to start, but in a way apprehensive - it feels like so much more is at stake now that I have finished two novels and been taught The Official Proper Way to Write, and what if I fall on my face? Reminding myself it's supposed to be fun sometimes works for this one.

life drawing - longer poses

Some longer poses from the same workshop.
These all lasted between 30 and 40 minutes. I can't remember which are which now, possibly because this timespan feels pretty similar when you are drawing.








Typically a model works along one wall of a room and the artists set up their equipment in a semi-circle facing them.











This workshop gets fairly full and there are two rows: people on chairs with small sketchbooks in front and people standing up at easels behind them.





I usually stand - you see more, and it prevents my work getting too tiny and precious.









This workshop runs in four main sessions over a weekend day, with a set of short poses or a couple of longer ones in each session, with tea-breaks or lunch in between.

Life drawings - quick poses

I've been better at attending life drawing workshops recently, after months of very sporadic drawing. I find it makes a big difference if I keep in practice. I am typically a fairly fast drawer, which is useful for big classes, or spotting something interesting on the move.








I thought I might explain what happens at a life class/workshop/session for those who have not tried them, also what the point is.

I go to a workshop which runs monthly in my city. There is no teaching, which is fine for me as I have been drawing on and off for years. Total newcomers would probably find a class more useful, although this particular space does its best to accommodate beginners and the other participants give them tips.





This series of sketches are from the warm-up session first thing in the morning.
Most classes or workshops will start with a few short poses, each one anything from five to ten minutes. This is both to help the model to warm up and get flexible, and to help the artists get used to drawing.

You'd typically draw these with charcoal or some other medium which flows easily and isn't too "tight". You don't bother rubbing out your mistakes, or measuring anything - there isn't time.




Models typically do keep still for all that time - up to 45 minutes at a time for long poses. For a painting class, they might be keeping the same pose for many hours with a series of short breaks in between. I would be useless at that! Many models are also dancers or actors, or do yoga or martial arts, so they are well aware of their bodies and what they can and can't do.






The question some of my US relatives ask is, "Why naked people?"
Historically narrative paintings were the most esteemed, so anyone who was anyone as a painter needed to be able to create convincing people. It's easier to understand the structure of a person without clothes on top, especially at first. People are also really hard to draw or paint: a tree with a branch slightly wrong often looks OK, a person with an arm drawn out of scale looks very obviously incorrect. Once you get over the frustration of looking down at your paper to find yet another Frankenstein's monster, you learn quickly from your mistakes.

Today many artists, even people who never paint figures, or are purely abstract artists, still value what they learn from this discipline.

Preparing for NaNoWriMo 09 - drawings

(If you don't know what this NaNo thing is, and you want to, click on the strange machine in the sidebar.)

I'm getting ready for November. Since I have been drawing more recently, as well as writing, I have some sketches towards my "book cover" - NaNo allows participants to upload information about their proposed fiction, including an image.

My story is going to involve someone who already grows fruit and vegetables getting back into painting and drawing despite not having done any for years, so as part of the cover image, I will be using an apple pie and drawing of apples.

The apples are James Grieves and came from a friend's orchard. They are a delicious apple variety which can be eaten raw or cooked, but they are not available in supermarkets as they bruise too easily during transport.




The drawing is approx A2 size in conte crayon. They are also an interesting apple to draw as their skin varies from very plain yellow-green to highly coloured with red and orange blushes and stripes.



The full cover image has a working title - it's a satire on the happily-ever-after Aga (TM) saga, hence the general theme of "That which does not kill you can really scratch the enamel on your Aga." The image is one more hook on which to hang your preparatory ideas, alongside plot plans, character sketches (words or pictures) and other design material.