The dog had a bath and now she’s running around like a maniac! Husb and I are dog-sitting while her people are on holiday. She’s a Pomerpoo – a Pomeranian / Toy Poodle cross – very small with lots of black fluffy fur. When we bathed her it stuck up all over the place. She’s not too pleased about it. Sparta Puss thinks it’s quite funny though.
I recently made myself a tiny watercolour paintbox, using an old tin that originally had a dried up stamping ink pad in it. I filled one side with DAS airdry clay and pushed 6 semi-circular depressions into it with the round end of a menthol inhaler. And let it dry – it took about a week. Then I gave it a couple of coats of white acrylic paint to seal it. Once it was dry, I squirted a blob of good quality liquid watercolour from tubes into the little holes – Lemon Yellow, Vermilion, Crimson, Pthalo Blue, Purple and Green. Then I let them dry out before taking it out into the field.
It works pretty well. The paints get wet, dry out, get wet again with no impact upon their quality. Here’s one I did earlier in the summer using ballpoint pen with the watercolours.
Here’s another quick sketch in ballpoint pen and watercolour from the summer supper event at Swansea’s Graft garden yesterday evening. It’s been developed in the grounds of the National Waterfront Museum, started by artist Owen Griffiths as part of last year’s “Nawr Yr Arwr” art festival. Pop in and have a look. The museum is great anyway and the Graft garden has loads of food plants, wild flowers, bees and a cob oven … and other stuff too.
Husb and I spend a good evening at the Graft garden at Swansea’s National Waterfront Museum. It was Graft’s summer supper event, with food grown in the garden and cooked in the new cob oven. There was a very interesting honey extraction demo from local beekeepers Alyson and Chelsea. And a little boy put on a bee suit to help out – I scribbled him …
A lovely drawing blog post by Patricia McKenna-Jones, looking at how she started sketching so many years ago….
via Beginnings
And here are the last two heads that I drew at the Riverside Folk Club in Loughor last week. It’s right by, well, the river side.
Gigs are a good opportunity for drawing as people are usually engrossed in what’s going on and keep reasonably still. Unless it’s a heavy metal gig. I’m usually too busy headbanging to draw then.
Scribbling away at Loughor folk club the other evening, I saw this interesting arrangement of a hand in the foreground and a head in the back ground. Nice bit of perspective, I thought. So I scribbled it…..
Some more scribbles from the Loughor Folk Club the other evening. Loughor is an interesting little fishing village on the estuary of the River Loughor / Afan Llwchwr.
Husb sings in a small community choir and they did a few songs at Loughor Folk Club, so I went along. Of course, I had to have a scribble. It’s held at the local yacht club which is why there are boaty things on the wall.
Today, Husb and I went to help with the annual maintenance at the labyrinth in Rosehill Quarry, installed back in 1987 by Bob Shaw and Dewi Bowen. It’s based on an ancient Cretan design and is cut into the grass, the incised path filled with crushed cockle shells that are a by-product of the local seafood industry. It’s an important place for Husb and me because this is where we met back in the 1980’s. Britain was in the middle of a recession, there was mass unemployment, especially affecting young people and graduates. Husb and I were both out of work and ended up involved in a job creation programme that paid unemployed people to work part-time on community projects.
Local residents had started a group to reclaim this amazing inner-city wild space and turn it into one of the first urban wildlife refuges in the country. The Cretan labyrinth is a lasting legacy of their vision and foresight and a subsequent generation of residents have been active in keeping Rosehill Quarry maintained and open for all to enjoy.
Here I am a while back sketching the labyrinth in chalk, charcoal and soft pastels.
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