Not exactly a rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, but I like to pop into the cafe upstairs in the local Waterstones bookshop for a cuppa and a scribble from time to time. People there are usually absorbed in whatever book they’ve bought and it’s easier to draw them. I took a few seconds to sketch these heads in my sketchbook.
This week’s #StandingStoneSunday megalith is the Is-coed stone near Ferryside in Carmarthenshire. I was travelling around drawing Bronze Age and Neolithic monuments with filmmaker Melvyn Williams and pre-historian Dewi Bowen a while back, drawing the sites that will feature in Dewi’s upcoming book based on the tale of Y Twrch Trwyth in the Mabinogion.
It’s Saturday/Caturday once again and here’s one from 10 years ago, with Little Ming dozing in front, Sparta Puss snoozing behind. Little Ming is no longer with us, she was a delightful cat that Husb and I rescued from neglect. She was very ill and not expected to survive but pulled through and lived with us happily for nearly 18 years.
Here’s a one-minute time lapse video of the recent painting I did with Ed Sumner’s “Cheese and Wine Painting Club”, a portrait of a woman by Pablo Picasso. It features my cat Sparta Puss, who likes to watch while I work. And give a few death stares to camera!
I’m thinking of painting another portrait of my young niece, she’s full of attitude, in a good way, and I love sketching her. Here’s the first of the preliminary sketches from a photo of her, with graphite block onto a heavy Khadi paper. It’s the very beginning of the process. More sketches are needed before I commit anything to canvas.
I had a little play with Gradient Map in Adobe Photoshop with a detail of the sketch. It’s fun but a little on the “She Hulk” side 😀
Finally finished faffing about with my little portrait of my young niece. It’s taken me ages because I just couldn’t decide when it was finished and I kept faffing with it. I started with some preliminary sketches then built up the painting in layers, using Liquitex acrylics onto stretched canvas. I worked from photos and at one stage was working with the photo and canvas upside down which made it easier to get a good likeness.
I started painting during the early days of the pandemic lockdown after a break of decades (I’m a printmaker and scribbler). I joined the Cheese and Wine Painting Club on Facebook and painted along with artist Ed Sumner weekly for about 18 months. I was pleased with most of the work I did but there are a few that I really hate! I’m of that generation brought up to “Waste Not, Want Not” so I recycled these canvases for reuse today.
I had a tub of acrylic gesso knocking around so I grabbed a stiff spatula and shlepped it over the offending images. I put it on thickly to create a textured surface to use for new paintings.
It’s #Standingstonesunday again and I’ve been looking through the painting / drawings I did of some of the ancient stone monuments of South Wales a while back. I was travelling around hunting the wild megaliths with filmmaker Melvyn Williams and pre-historian Dewi Bowen. We trekked up the mountain near Trecastle to visit the Nant Tarw stone circles and cairn.
The Bronze Age circles are made up of small, rather insignificant stones and although fascinating historically and culturally, they were not particularly inspiring visually and nor were the cairns. However, the scenery was absolutely spectacular, with the Fan Brycheiniog face of Mynydd Du (the Black Mountain) in the distance. It had been snowing and the Fan was streaked with black and white stripes.
You can read more about my visit to Nant Tarw here...
Ed Sumner’s “Cheese and Wine Painting Club” is back on Facebook! Brilliant. Ed started it during lockdown and ran it every Friday for about 18 months. Since lockdown ended and we’ve all been getting back to what we were doing before, Ed has only done an occasional one, and today was one of those days! We copied a portrait of a woman by Pablo Picasso.
We started by drawing the head in pencil, unusual as Ed normally gets us straight into the paint. But once the drawing was done, it was easy to fill in the colours, a bit like painting by numbers to be honest. I’m chuffed, it’s so much fun and I learn loads about handling paint. It needs a bit more faffing, maybe another half hour or so and I’m done.
I’m playing around with Adobe Photoshop and some of the charcoal drawings I did back in the early days of lockdown in 2020, when we just had an hour a day out of our houses. Back then, the drawings looked quite grim to me, in stark black and white on heavy textured Khadi paper, which gave them a jagged look. Now after a couple of years and a return to – almost – normality, I’m enjoying combining them with colour, they feel different and there’s a strangeness to this tree with the colours added.
Here’s the original, from Cwmdonkin Park, which was part of the regular route that Husb and I walked.
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