VELLUM THAT!

Yesterday I attended a wonderful live model session at the Los Altos Hills City Hall.  Karen Druker created the event as a fundraiser and there were 20 artists working in various media with three different modeling stations.  One was a beautiful senior woman, one was a woman doing Yoga poses (it hurt just to see her hold these poses for extended time) and the last was my favorite model, Christina and some handsome dude with gorgeous hair, longer than Christina's.  I can never seem to pass up an opportunity to draw Christina, so I settled in there.  Because this was a very public venue, all the models were clothed.  I was not very inspired by the choice of clothing, so I focused on faces and torsos instead.  I was able to be very close to the models compared to the other drawing venues.  This allowed me to see features much better.  We were even allowed to take photos, so I can finish some of these drawings at my leisure.  These drawings were 5 , 10 and 20 minute poses, not necessarily in the order of appearance.

I decided to just take my iPad and stylus for this session instead of hauling lots of art supplies and easels, etc.  I used the application "Vellum" and had a great time exploring the different settings.  There are 3 different Erase categories.  One is hard erase, one is soft erase (like taking a kneaded eraser and lifting charcoal from the page!) and the last setting titled Erase was like conte crayon in various shades of sanguine and buff, etc.  Way cool!!!!!!  I decided I wanted to "tone" the page first and then draw into it and lift out.  So far, my only frustration with this program is the inability to alter the width of the mark in the "Line" setting.  You can adjust the value of the line but not the width.  At least not that I have discovered.  Maybe my Kickstarter support of the YuFu Stylus will help with that.  This is a pressure sensitive stylus that will vary the line as you work. It has a very fine tip which will make it easy to see exactly where I am placing my mark.  I should received mine by May, I hope!  Now, if someone would just invent a way to eliminate the glare on the iPad screen in sunlight so I could do more sketching outside.  

After the drawing session everyone was invited back to Karen's gorgeous home for a delicious luncheon.  She even made it a little celebration of my AWS signature acceptance.  That was embarrassing but thoughtful. Thank you Karen for a fabulous event.  You are the most remarkable, energetic, dynamic, generous and prolific artist, hostess and philanthropic woman I know!