I’ve been thinking about how artwork develops from my original sketches.
I always carry a sketchbook and have dozens and dozens stuffed into cupboards with thousands of sketches done over the years and most stay locked away. But occasionally I find something that inspires me to use some of them as the basis for new work, usually some form of printmaking. About 3 years ago I was fortunate enough to visit Pakistan for a month as a resident artist at the Zaira Zaka Print Studio near Rawalpindi. On a crazy car journey from Rawalpindi to Lahore on my birthday in the worst storm I’ve ever seen, I sat in the back of the car and scribbled with my Daler Rowney pastels into a Khadi handmade paper sketchbook, capturing speedy impressions of the ever-changing atmospheric landscape as we drove. When I came back I edited the drawings into a video (below).
I also took the sketches into the studio at Swansea Print Workshop and started to work on small full-colour monotypes; if you want to find out more about my technique, please click here.
I have put my series of drawings of ancient Welsh monuments on Artfinder. If you want to see more, please click on the image below or the Artfinder link at the top right of this page.
I went to our local art gallery, The Glynn Vivian earlier today for a talk from the artist in residence, Sharon Morris, one of the nine exhibiting artists in one of the current exhibitions, ‘The Moon And A Smile’, inspired by early Victorian photographs from the Dillwyn Llewellyn family who lived at Penllergare and Sketty Hall in Swansea. The exhibition responds to a time in the 1840s and 1850s when Swansea was at the centre of international experiments in photography, especially Mary Dillwyn, John Dillwyn Llewellyn and his daughter Thereza. I had to have a scribble of course, and did this drawing of Sharon Morris as she spoke. I drew into my tiny new Paperblanks sketchbook with a Faber Castell Pitt pen, size F.
scribblah 