I was down at Swansea Print Workshop this afternoon, doing loads of monotypes (more about those tomorrow) and as I was cleaning up at the end, the printing inks blended together. I liked it. It was a pity to wash them away.
Technical note: they’re Caligo Safe Wash oil-based relief inks in Process Yellow, Magenta and Cyan.
I’ve been neglecting my Samsung Galaxy Note 8 tablet recently. It has a free drawing app on it, one called ‘Markers’ that I really like using but haven’t done so for weeks. I’ve got a bit of a cold and I’m slobbing out on the settee and it was easier to reach for my tablet rather than go and rummage around for a sketchbook and drawing materials. The cat’s slobbing out on the settee next to me so she was an obvious target – I mean subject – and I carried on using the continuous line technique that I’ve been practicing a lot lately.
I do a lot of cooking, especially baking, but I rarely draw food. I made a crumble today with raspberries from our allotment, some Bramley cooking apples from a friend and some wild blackberries. It was lush! The drawing is an old one, of some Tinker’s Cakes I made on a traditional Maen or Bakestone. They’re like Welsh Cakes but made with grated apple instead of dried fruit.
For crumble, I toss the raw fruit in a mixture of sugar and ground arrowroot before topping it with the crumble mix. The arrowroot turns the liquid into a nice sauce while it’s cooking and stops it becoming soggy.
I was dog-sitting last Friday and went down to the Climate Change strike to do some sketches en plein air. I like drawing crowds, it’s a good exercise. The dog had different ideas though.
She’s only a year old and still very excitable and because she’s so cute she was getting loads of attention. There were hundreds of children so I should have anticipated it. It made sketching very difficult, with her tugging on her lead all the time and people fussing her. Not ideal conditions to have a scribble. I did my best.
Here’s the little tyrant.
I went to GS Artists on High Street earlier to a meeting planning to pull together a group of local artists, a union or cooperative to represent our interests. It was a good start, lots of ideas but a lot of work ahead of us because most artists are self-employed and often working in isolation. We’re also prone to exploitation – so much pressutre to work for very little or even nothing! “You’ll get exposure” they say. You can die of exposure. It’s surprising the number of allegedly reputable organisations that try to get artists to work for no pay – or maybe it isn’t so surprising. We live in a society where artists and the arts are so undervalued.
Anyway, I had a scribble. Using ballpoint pen with the continuous line technique.
I spent a day in Cardiff with colleagues from the FIRE Lab. We had a stand at the Sêr Cymru celebration, all about the scientific research projects in universities across Wales funded by the Sêr Cymru research and development programme. It was fascinating to hear about how much high level technological research is going on in this little country of ours. As the team’s artist-in-residence, I did a printmaking demo on our stall, using a vinyl block I had cut based on a drawing I did of a stream bed up in the Brecon Beacons a couple of months ago when I was on a field trip.
Here’s another view of the horse skull I drew yesterday evening at the little Zoology Museum at Swansea University’s Wallace Building. The Mari Lwyd (Grey Mare) tradition in South Wales centres around a horse skull, which is made into a lifesize puppet and decorated with flowers, bells and ribbons. It’s paraded around on the night of Hen Galan – the Old New Year – as part of a ritual that goes back thousands of years to the ancient Celtic horse goddess Epona, also know as Rhiannon in Wales.
I spent a great hour or so down at the Zoology Museum in The Wallace Building on the Swansea University Singleton campus this evening. A drawing group meets there twice a month to make the most of the specimens tucked away. I fancied studying a horse’s skull, to tie in with my previous work with the Mari Lwyd. It was nice to draw a still one that wasn’t carousing all over the place. I used a biro pen in the continuous line method with a wash of home-made walnut ink into a small, A6, sketchbook.
I’ve been posting about the field trips I went on recently with colleagues from Swansea University’s FIRE Lab, walking the path of the River Tawe and making cyanotypes along the way. Mostly we made photograms – photographic prints made directly from found objects placed on the paper. But we also took some time out to draw onto Over Head Projector (OHP) acetates with various drawing materials to make transparencies to expose back at Swansea Print Workshop‘s Ultraviolet Unit. Younger readers might not know what an Overhead Projector is. It’s proper old school. These days we’d use a Powerpoint presentation, a laptop and a projector. Back in the day, we drew or printed our material onto an OHP acetate and it was projected onto a screen from an Over Head Projector.
The picture shows the transparencies on the UV Unit, ready to be exposed.
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