El Monestir de Pedralbes

Some weeks ago I made a visit to the Monastery of Pedralbes, a little gothic jewel inside Barcelona. I liked it so much that I went again a couple of weeks after with Sant Lluc course attendees.


The cloister is not as rich as some others I've seen before (with a different capital for each column and so on) but is really elegant and harmonious.


This is the Queen's Hall, a good example of how proportions and space are Pedralbe's main appeals instead of richness and ornaments.


This a well in the cloister garden seen from the upper gallery. There was a marriage at the church and some few visitors, not so much people for a spring weekend. A very still, quiet and beautiful place to draw. I think I'll come back.

Going hi tech

After many working hours from the design board and huge amounts of money, sweat and talent invested, here is our new long waited WC Holder 2.0.
Someone proposed to call it iHolder but it was decided that such name could be too gorish.


Now seriously. I didn't got satisfied with the WC Holder 1.0 (see this link) and I remained wondering how could I improve it.

Then one day I saw a set of methacrylate photo holders as these:


I bought the entire set (about 10 euros in a Carrefour hypermarket) and took the smallest one...


...glued a couple of fridge magnets on it...


...and that's all. No more steps.

The palette of the WC box is also a new version (see the old one on this link). Now I'm using just the 3 basic but unsaturated colors: indigo instead of blue, burnt sienna instead of red and yellow ochre (more exactly quinacridone gold) instead of yellow, all them from Winsor & Newton.

The comparison between the version 1.0 in cardboard and 2.0 in methacrylate needs no further explanations.

For the device at work here are a couple of pictures made by Víctor Martínez "Swasky".

Teaching (and learning)

Drawings made while teaching the course "Drawing the City" about which I blogged some weeks ago. Every lesson consists of about half an our in the classroom and 2 and a half hours of drawing from life. I always make the same exercises I propose to the the students.

In this case, identifying simple volumes...


...before drawing architecture (this is a crossroads in Poblenou 100 meters far from my house).


Here we went again to see a rehearsal of the Castellers de Sants for drawing people.


For the next drawings we went to the Parc de la Ciutadella and the idea was to draw without lines, just color stains were allowed.


Drawings from other people at the course can be seen on this flickr group.