What am I going to do with this little lot then? Something to do with my geographic palette …….
Heavy Metal
I spent a happy afternoon at Swansea Print Workshop, starting to prepare for a new series of printmaking for my artist residency at The FIRE Lab. I’m planning a mixed bag of techniques based on my drawings en plein air of Victorian culverts. I rummaged around in the drawers of my plans chest to find some metal plates and came up with three copper (one partially used) and an aluminium. So my next stage is to prepare them for use. I’ll use Andrew Baldwin’s Sandpaper Aquatint technique for the copper and then a coffee resist combined with spit-bite for the aluminium.
Here’s a short video of Andrew demonstrating how to do Spit Bite.
And here’s one about the Sandpaper Aquatint
The Dog Had A Bath
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.
Squirting Blobs
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.
In The Graft Garden
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.
The Beekeepers
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 …
Beginnings
A lovely drawing blog post by Patricia McKenna-Jones, looking at how she started sketching so many years ago….
via Beginnings
The Last Heads
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.
A Nice Bit Of Perspective
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…..
Faces At The Folk Club
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.
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