Higgledy Piggledy Hillside.

It’s unusual for me to draw anything other than people and the odd animal but there’s an interesting jumbled cityscape scrambling up the hill opposite the window in my new studio. I’ve injured my foot and my chiropodist asked me to keep off it as much as possible for a few weeks. A few weeks!!!!!! It’s terrible. You only realise how physical art is when some of your body is out of action. Keeping off my feet means not doing any printmaking, not working at the easel, not doing anything large at all. I’m using the time to catch up with admin [tax returns yuk!], reading and research [I have a year’s worth of back copies of a-n magazine to get through] and some chair-based sketching. So to push my artistic boundaries I thought I’d start drawing the cityscape opposite.

Not easy! I have to be disciplined enough to get proportions and perspective right but ‘artsy’ enough so it doesn’t look like an architectural drawing. I’m using a Tate Landscape sketchbook which is 58 x 15 cms fully opened so I can do a panoramic view and I might eventually do several, one above the other, stacking them so I get all the hillside in. At this stage I’m concentrating on accuracy, because I’m new to the subject matter, but maybe there’s scope for redrawing onto Mark Resist [Mylar] film in a much freer style to form the basis for some screenprinting? Hmmmmmmm…….

I’m using a variety of Derwent pencils, from HB and through a range of B grades. I rarely use pencil – don’t like ‘em, but as I’m pushing my boundaries by not drawing the human body, I might as well go the whole hog and try and get used to graphite at the same time. I much prefer the cleaner lines of drawing pens, but there are some nice qualities to the graphite that I haven’t really explored before. Here’s the first stage of the drawing – some of it is still very pale and so far I’ve only used the right hand page of the sketchbook. The left hand side will take in the local brothel. Interesting area!