Fever Dream part 8

 

The last main piece of my new block drawing was a third helicopter nurse.  For the two inside the room I used photos from the internet as my sources, but the largest and most prominent one, and perhaps the most significant one, I wanted to get a live posable model.  At first I had thought about asking one of the assistants at my physical therapy place (ether one would do), but suddenly all their schedules changed and they weren't around when I was, then my time there ended.  More recently, I decided my speech therapist might work.  Her build was appropriate to what I had in mind, her standard clothing for work would suffice for conversion to scrubs, and she had some appreciation for my art skills.  So I asked her and she agreed to a quick sketch session there in the office, following our appointment for therapy.  

Today was the scheduled day. I brought with me a sketchbook and pencils, an eraser, the block itself, a sample block of the same material (birch, the one I used for the video piece last summer), a mirror, some painter's tape to mark the XY axis that will help me add the helicopter later, plus some surgical gloves and masks in case we needed them.  (Normally she wears a face shield, requirement for the office, but the masks were more common for nurses, including the one she is portraying.)  And of course, the binder where all my speech exercises and homework is kept. We took care of that first.

I had the actual block for two reasons.  First, I figured she deserved to see the actual block itself, and the drawing so far, as she deserved to know what she would be part of and why I was doing it.  Second, I needed to see how the figure would fit in, plus this way I only had to draw it once, instead of drawing it on paper, then copying that drawing onto my block.  My concept called for this last nurse to be helping to open the door to my studio, so we had to figure out how to make use of the door to her office for this purpose (not the same hinge system, and there was the open in/open out thing and the mirror effect, but my art training and print experience helped me to figure it out) and the best way to pose her for the image. With all this figured out, the simple gestural sketch took only a few minutes.  Used the mirror to make sure it was all working in reverse, and that was it.  I'll refine it, add more details in the coming days.   

I was hoping to be able to add a photo of this new figure (and the block itself for that matter) to this blog post, but my camera is still missing, probably in storage.  My new phone (earlier this year) technically has a camera in it, and I did take a photo of today's work, but despite watching many internet videos over the past few months, I still haven't figured out how to get photos from my phone to an email so I can get them to my computer. I may have to stop by the store where I bought it (here in town) and ask them to show me how to do it.   Meanwhile, I have a photo and will continue to work on my drawing.