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The English National Ballet offers live drawing workshops in venues across the country. This gives the public a unique opportunity to observe and draw ballet dancers during their daily company class. Without the costumes, makeup, lights and scenery you get a very authentic, behind-the-scenes, view of the dancers. This fresh perspective helps you to appreciate the dedication, repetition and hard work that is required to produce the effortless-looking polished performance.

The workshop was held at the Coliseum in London and was led by artist Heidi Wigmore. The session began at 10am with an introduction and some basic warm up, observation exercises. At 11am we were taken into the stalls in the main auditorium and as we had the space to ourselves we had the luxury of sitting wherever we chose.

The company class was divided into two parts; a warm up session on the barre; and a more energetic and complex set of dance routines performed across the floor. The dancers arrived wearing furry boots, leggings and jumpers to keep their limbs warm, which were gradually removed as the dancers warmed up; ballet pointe shoes were only worn during the second half.

The company class finished at 12.30pm and we finished the session with a review of the work we had produced. These are a few of my drawings…

In January 2015 I began to take photos of the Thames Estuary for my own photography calendar project. As I live by the Thames Estuary, and travel along its coastline on a regular basis, I became aware of how varied the estuary looked throughout the seasons. Sometimes the view is affected by the light and reflections; the weather; the tides; or from the various shipping vessels and social activities in the water. I decided to capture some of these changes throughout 2015 with the aim of creating a calendar for 2016.

Each month I visited a different part of the estuary, between Shoeburyness and Leigh-on-Sea, where I took a selection of photos. I then selected my favourite photo from each month to use for the corresponding month in the calendar.

These are the photos I selected:

Following on from the Creative Journal courses I have been attending at Metal in Southend, I was given the opportunity to attend a one day life-drawing workshop, also at Metal, and I took the challenge. The last time I did life-drawing was during my Art Foundation course (which was a good few years ago), so I was definitely overdue.

The workshop was led by Heidi Wigmore and combined life-drawing with the theme of theatrical/props/masks.

During the morning we had a female model and we began by doing a few quick one-minute sketches to warm-up.

This was followed by several longer poses where the model wore various props and theatrical accessories including a tutu, feather boa and mask.

After lunch we had a male model and again began the session with a number of one-minute poses to warm-up.

This was followed by longer poses using more theatrical props and a mirror.

The day was a lot of fun and I’ve really got the bug for life-drawing again. The next workshop I’ll be attending is at the English National Ballet in London, where we’ll be drawing the dancers during their rehearsal – very excited!

I’ve now completed my third six-week creative journal course, which are held at Metal in Southend. As this session began in autumn, our work was very much inspired by the vibrant seasonal changes in the natural environment.

Some of the themes we covered were decay, colour, form and repetition; developing our ideas with a range of mixed media including bleach, ink, pencil collaged with scrap paper…

…mixing natural and unnatural colours with leaf rubbings…

…making observational drawings with pen and ink.

I particularly liked the skeletal form of the hydrangea petal and the shadows I created with the leaves…