Sounds Like A Plan…

d Step 1

Still experimenting with pastels on paper today, this time using a beautiful mid-weight vintage paper from a British mill that no longer exists. I wanted to be a bit more specific with the colours so I started working with various blue Daler Rowney soft pastels, using both hands to make randomised marks on the paper and then getting grubby with my fingers, rubbing away at some of the areas to soften the lines and intensify the hues.

Then I divided the paper with a fold and worked into one half with a black pastel and into the other with pale blue and white. I’m starting to get some ideas for using these papers. I will be working en plein air on Friday this week at the Cardiff Arts Week festival in Mill Lane. I think that most of the artists involved will be painting but I don’t paint. Messy stuff. So I thought I’d use these prepared papers to do some collaged cityscapes, working in the details with something intense like carbon. Sounds like a plan to me.

 

 

 

A lot of my artwork is available on my Artfinder gallery.  If you’d like to have a look, please click on the image below or the Artfinder link at the top right of this page.

Like A Cartoon Fight

c Step 4

Another scribbling experiment today. layering Daler Rowney soft pastels over an old screen print, I started with a rusty ochre pastel to start with, rubbing in places to alter the texture and the intensity of the colour. Then I worked my way through green to a very dark brown, then white at the very end.

The final piece of paper looks,to me, like one of those cartoon fights in a comic book, with clouds of stylised dust flying. Perhaps I should put in some little cartoon fists 😀

 

 

A lot of my artwork is available on my Artfinder gallery.  If you’d like to have a look, please click on the image below or the Artfinder link at the top right of this page.

Paper Experiments

b Step 3

I’ve been carrying on doing randomised scribbles over discarded screenprints today. I’m planning on using them on Friday when I’m spending the whole day in Cardiff drawing / painting en plein air.

I started with a screenprint that I did on Zerkall paper some time ago that I didn’t like and scribbled with a reddish ochre Daler Rowney soft pastel. I did a bit of rubbing with my finger over parts of it, to get some different textures. Then I overlaid with black scribbles and finally white.

I took some digital closeups because I want to try out some digital development ideas at some time.

 

 

A lot of my artwork is available on my Artfinder gallery.  If you’d like to have a look, please click on the image below or the Artfinder link at the top right of this page.

Scribbles On Scribbles

Step 7

Building on top of what I did yesterday, I scribbled randomly with a white Daler Rowney soft pastel, instinctively concentrating the marks towards the centre. Then I added small amounts of colour – yellow, rose and blue. I don’t know how I’ll use this yet, I might rip it up for collage or I might draw or paint on top.

I like the close up digital images I’ve taken. Of course, I could work on this digitally. It’s something I don’t often do but there’s no reason not to. I’m out of my comfort zone here but taking a lead from the Surrealists who used to do creative exercises like this to help them to work from their imagination instead of relying on working from life. It’s an interesting process.

 

 

A lot of my artwork is available on my Artfinder gallery.  If you’d like to have a look, please click on the image below or the Artfinder link at the top right of this page.

Scribbles, Screens And Sketches

Step 1

A while back, some years in fact, I made some photoscreens using little annotated drawings from one of my sketchbooks and I printed them up onto really nice Zerkall paper. Unfortunately, I didn’t like them. They didn’t seem, to me, to make the transition from sketch to screenprint. So I stuffed them in a draw and left them for a long time, thinking that I might reuse the paper in future.

KimRose 1

Earlier this week I did some really abstract scribbles, layering random marks of pastels onto paper and today I decided that’s what I would try to do with some of these discarded screenprints.

So I started scribbling away with a black Daler Rowney soft pastel, rubbing with my fingers in areas to get a more intense black.

Step 5

Tomorrow, I’ll work on some more layers to add more depth and colour.

 

A lot of my artwork is available on my Artfinder gallery.  If you’d like to have a look, please click on the image below or the Artfinder link at the top right of this page.

Surreal Scribbles

Husb and I were just listening to the BBC4 concert of music by Ravi Shankar and Phillip Glass, with the awesome Anoushka Shankar playing. It was sublime. I decided to do a bit of automatic drawing,  which the Surrealists did a lot of. I uploaded a photo of a pastel multilayered scribble that I worked on a couple of days ago into the Markers app on my Samsung Galaxy Tablet Note 8. Then I started scribbling along with the music, randomly,  without trying to make the marks look like anything in particular.  I rarely draw from my imagination,  I draw from life, so it’s good for me to let go and give myself a bit of freedom. 

Getting Physical

KimRose 1

I normally scribble on my own but today I was facilitating an art session and started off with a physical art exercise to warm us up. A lot of people don’t realise how physical art can be. I think that’s maybe because a lot of people do art as a hobby and perhaps don’t go so far into the technology or the physically demanding side of it.

KimRose 2

I stuck a large sheet of paper from a roll onto a long table with masking tape and handed the other person a black chalky pastel. I had one too. Then we attacked the paper! No plans, no ideas, just scribble, jab, stipple, rub all over. After a few minutes it was covered in myriad shades and textures of black. Then we picked up white chalky pastels and did the same….. then some muted colours for a couple more layers. The results are fascinating, a bit like looking into infinity. Although it was just a warm-up exercise, these could be worked into collages or mixed media pieces.

A lot of my artwork is available on my Artfinder gallery.  If you’d like to have a look, please click on the image below or the Artfinder link at the top right of this page.

Keep Still!

Keep still

Why is it that the minute, THE VERY MINUTE, that you start sketching a sleeping cat they fidget??!! We’re just trained monkeys. Nothing more.  😦

 

 

A lot of my artwork is available on my Artfinder gallery.  If you’d like to have a look, please click on the image below or the Artfinder link at the top right of this page.

Somewhere Special To Look At Mobile Phones

chalking 2

Husb and I just got back from Oriel Ceri Richard’s Gallery, at Taliesin Art Centre, which has been at the centre of protests in recent months because of plans by Swansea University to close it. It was opened in 1984 and named after Welsh painter Ceri Richards. It has showcased local, national and international artists, living and dead, over the past two and a bit decades. When we arrived, there was no art on the walls but lots of photos of artists who have exhibited there over the years; there I am above with the 15 Hundred Lives collective, fellow artists Graham Parker and Sylvie Evans.

chalking 1

Someone had brought some coloured chalks so I started scribbling, of course. It’s like being a kid again but without grown ups to tell you off 😀 Once I started drawing I was oblivious to anything else. The University wants the space for ‘an enhanced student experience’. The artist’s impression shows a playgroup-type space with lots of students sitting around on boxes looking at their mobile phones. Because they need somewhere special to look at their mobile phones, don’t they? It’s such a shame that a gallery with such a good reputation is being lost to the area. The University seems to have forgotten that the Taliesin Arts Centre, which houses the gallery, was mainly funded by Swansea’s local communities through a public Development Appeal Fund in the 1960s. And now the public is to be deprived of it.  Here’s a petition if you’d like to sign it.

 

 

A lot of my artwork is available on my Artfinder gallery.  If you’d like to have a look, please click on the image below or the Artfinder link at the top right of this page.

Fanny Eaton, Pre-Raphaelite muse

 This is a fascinating blog I wanted to share. Worth a look.         http://wp.me/p6qHAP-iG