Light as air

I had a really fantastic time at the English National Ballet (ENB) drawing workshop at the Empire Theatre in Liverpool yesterday. This is one of my charcoal drawings from the session. We had a super talk beforehand by Heidi Wigmore, who is the artist-in-residence or some such with ENB. She had us look at drawings of dancers by Degas, Rodin and Kandinsky, giving examples of very swift line drawings. Then we had a Look at photos of dancers and had progressively less time to draw them, starting with 30 seconds, then 20, 10 and 5 seconds! It was an excellent start to the workshop, because when we went into the theatre to watch the ENB company have their dance lesson, the dancers did move very quickly!
A good thing was that different dancers took the same poses and exercises, so my drawing above is formed from three different people!

Today the peanut and I are off to the matinee of The Nutcracker, so it will be interesting to see if I recognise any of the dancers now they are in full make-up and costume.

Will report back tomorrow!