It’s A Heatwave!

It’s so hot at the moment, we Brits don’t do extreme weather very well. It’s been over 30 Centigrade for the past few days. It’s quite a mild climate here in South Wales anyway, here’s one of the palm trees on the beach nearby.

Sketchbook Archives: 63

Looking through my sketchbooks from June 2015, I was going through a phase of pasting brown wrapping paper into my sketchbooks to give a bit more variety to my drawings. Here are some I did of musicians at one of the local folk clubs.

#Caturday Archives: 51

I’ve been going through my old sketchbooks for Caturdays for about a year now, here’s number 51 from February 2017. Just a couple of quick sketches in Faber Castell Pitt drawing pens into a tiny A7 size sketchbook.

Life Drawing: No MoJo

My mojo just wasn’t with me last night at life drawing at Swansea Print Workshop. We had a great model that I’ve drawn before and I had lovely paper and graphite, but I just couldn’t get into it. The drawing isn’t too bad, but the likeness isn’t quite there. Sometimes that’s just the way it is.

Life Drawing: Just Back

Just back from life drawing at Swansea Print Workshop and I’m just doing a quick post before going to bed. Nos da, goodnight

My Little Helper

I had a bit of a break from block cutting after my residency in April, I went away for nearly a week and I’ve been catching up on stuff too. So today I got out a prepared lino block and started carving. I had to give up after half an hour because a) my hand was hurting, no carving for a couple of weeks and it’s softened up; and b) Eric decided to “help”. As you can see. So I put it away for another day.

Channelling Ravilious.

I stayed in East Sussex last week, with some very dear old friends. We went to Towner Eastbourne and saw the permanent collection of work by the early 20th century artist Eric Ravilious. I’d always found his landscape paintings a little bit insipid, if I’m honest, but we went walking along the South Downs after seeing the exhibition and I realised that his palette is very accurate: the colours of this part of the East Sussex landscape are very muted and delicate. I did a quick pencil sketch en plein air and today I used gouache to start blocking in some colour. Once it’s dry, I’ll work over it with tiny patterns of slightly different shades and tints of the base colours. It was only when I got up close to the framed work in the Gallery that I realised the extent of his patterning.

Life Drawing: A Quiet Pose

It’s nice to get a quiet, reflective pose when I’m working with a model. It sort of influences how I do the drawing. I was able to do a lot of measuring with this one, which paid off because it’s fairly accurate. I prepared some recycled printmaking paper with a layer of acrylic paint squeegeed on (Daler Rowney System 3 with screenprint medium) and drew with a graphite block.

#Caturday Archives: 50

Can you believe it’s come round again! It’s #Caturday Saturday and here we are back in December 2016 in North Cyprus. This is one of the semi-feral cats living in our hotel garden. They were very well fed by both guests and staff and mostly quite tame.

Sketchbook Archives: 62

These are the last 5 of a series of 15 drawings I did in May 2015, based on sketches I made from life, out and about en plein air, drawing real people in real places. They are drawn over “transfer” prints, inkjet prints that are transferred chemically to fine art printmaking paper; mostly I used Bockingford and Somerset. Once the transfer print was dry, I re-drew from my sketchbook with Faber Castell Pitt drawing pens.