A musing Mark - Lovely buns! Cupcake in Colour Pencil, student work

Usually, I try to LOOK for appropriate subjects for my regular students to draw, but this week, I decided I wanted cupcakes, and a desperate hunt began.

Minor problem* number 1. Where to find them, immediately? Luckily, I have a few friends vying for the role of Oracle, and soon I had several leads.. I cycled off to the bakery nearest the art college, and wow! HUGE, slathered with sauce AND a cherry on the top. Cup cakes don't get much better than this...

and a little heart, for St Valentine..

Minor problem* number 2. They wouldn't fit in my panniers. So, I cycled home and went back in the car...

(*note - problems are only questions which help us find interesting and creative solutions)

This is Mark! (who is always amusing) 

As you can see from the photo above, I cut the paper down (we used bristol board, which is grain-free) so that everyone had the same size restriction as colour pencil is very slow. If we work large in colour pencil, it simply takes longer to do, and the students only had two and a half hours...

student selection

Selection of student work - delicious!

Even though everyone had the same sized paper to work on, it is interesting to see how everyone used the paper differently. Above right, Ciara's meltingly-lovely drawing is large enough to almost completely fill the page, by zooming in - this is effective as it reduces the amount of background area. 

By Nisa V. Student

Selection of student drawings - yummy!

Most of the photos were taken in the evening, so the quality isn't great, but you get the idea! 

An usuaul and challenging subject, as always. Meaning that, as usual, every class was punctuated by SIGHs, huffing, anxiety and a large dose of humour! A muse ing. 

Here are a few of the students, showing how to suffer for their art - they had to LOOK at the cakes, but not touch...! Note that the cakes were raised above the table-level, to give a more interesting view. all drawings were done as a careful line-drawing first, before colour was added.