Paper Geekery

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I spent a happy hour fondling beautiful papers and sniffing oil pigments and pulling on my favourite antique printing press. I was doing some trials on four lovely Japanese papers. This is an Atsukushi White, just 39 gsm. Above is the back of the paper on the woodcut block just after I’d put it through the press.

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And here it is, peeled off the inked surface. I also tried out ShoinBis, Shiohara and Sekishushi. I’ll check them out when they’re dry and see which performed best.

The image is from a little wood block I cut a few years back when Sparta Puss was little. She used to run up the curtains and totally wrecked the nets. One day I grabbed the camera and photographed her pulling shapes as she slid down the curtains. I did some drawings from the photos onto plywood, got out my Flexcut tools and hacked away and then hand printed a small edition of 30, currently available through Artfinder.

 

50 Shades Of Brown

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Yesterday, Husb and I went to the launch of the latest exhibition, Of Site And Song, at the lovely Workers Gallery in Ynyshir. This gorgeous venue recently celebrated its first birthday. It used to be the village library but it was closed down because of austerity cutbacks and artists Gayle Rogers and Chris Williams reopened it as a charming gallery, sculpture workshop, studio and art shop. They have also created a reading area for local people to drop in and browse art books. Chris is a sculptor and he created The Rhondda Tunnel in cardboard as the centrepiece of the new exhibition.

We drove back across the mountain but instead of our usual route  via Maerdy and Aberdare, we went through Treorchy and Pontrhydyfen. Whichever way you go the views are spectacular and during the Autumn the hills are burning with 50 shades of brown. Glorious.

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Another Reflection

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Here’s another piece from a few years back, a watercolour done at Swansea Print Workshop’s life drawing group onto an A3 spiral bound Cotman watercolour pad.

The Robe Reflected

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This is an old one of mine, from when I was going through a watercolour period at the weekly life drawing group at Swansea Print Workshop. This model has beautiful robes and we often try a pose or two with them on. The reflected figure in the large mirrors formed a composition that I really liked. I used an A3 spiral bound heavyweight watercolour sketchbook.

I never think of myself as a painter; I used the watercolour and brush to draw with the liquid. I didn’t try to do a lot of detail, I used fairly broad brushes to concentrate on colour rather than fine line.

Plum Cake And A Nude

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Just back from life drawing at Swansea Print Workshop. I hadn’t drawn this model before, she’s new but I got the hang of her reasonably well. Sometimes it takes ages to get used to a new model, sometimes things just fall in place. The portrait and figure took about 50 minutes then I did the semi-abstract one in the last few minutes. I used charcoal and chalk into an A2 sketchbook made from brown paper. I love drawing onto brown paper, it’s great having a ready-made mid tone .

I made a plum upside-down cake for tea break. I had some hard plums that were not juicy or interesting so I put them into the bottom of a cake tin and mixed up a sponge to go on top. It went down well enough and the plums tasted much better cooked.

Land Of Ice And Fire

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Husb and I visited Iceland (the country, not the shop) three winters ago and we managed to get a really cheap package deal to go again in a couple of weeks. It’s a fabulous place for an artist, although hard to draw outside in winter temperatures. I tried out different preparations for the papers I took last time so I’ll be replicating those when I go again. You need robust, thick paper, like a heavyweight Khadi, or card – I used mount board (matte board). I laid down some colours onto my papers and cards with ink washes and acrylics last time and drew over them with oil bars and soft pastels. I’ll be doing that again. My usual M.O. of lightweight sketchbook and drawing pens just doesn’t stand up to the moisture in the air and the piercing cold.

We’re hoping to see the Aurora Borealis this time – they didn’t show up on our last visit and I’ve booked myself into a half-day introduction at the Icelandic Elf School.

Let Sleeping Cats Lie

sleeping cats lie

Says it all, really 😀

Sparta Puss in my A5 lined cat sketchbook, The Cat’s Meow Journal, by Peter Pauper Press using Faber Castell Pitt drawing pens, sizes S and B.

The Final Cwtch

Tair Carn Uchaf

Another unseasonable warm and bright day, but glorious weather to say goodbye to artist Ann Jordan’s ‘Cwtch’, a giant woollen blanket and environmental installation. You can read more about this extraordinary piece here. It is in it’s final resting place, a circle of eroded peat bog up on the Black Mountain in the Brecon Beacons National Park in South Wales. A multi-generation group went up the mountain with Ann and some rangers from the national park and helped to stretch and lay it in place and then, after weighting the edge with local stones, we scattered a sackful of local heather seed over it. The blanket should provide a good environment for the seed to germinate and grow and stop the patch from further erosion.

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Of course, I took the opportunity to have a scribble. I’m looking west-ish here towards ‘Tair Carn Uchaf‘, the Welsh for The Three Upper Carns, ancient burial mounds in the distance and Carn Pen y Clogau on the right of the drawing. One of the park rangers described the area as a ‘Bronze Age Landscape Of The Dead’. That phrase brought up all sorts of images. I think I’ll be heading this way again, soon, to do some more drawing.

One From The Archives 24: A Pug In A Pink Sweater

Bruce the pug cuts a rare sartorial dash in this fetching pink sweater from the house of Calvin Canine. He is often the subject of my niece’s off the cuff dressing up adventures and has an extensive wardrobe.

Pug in a pink sweater

He seems to enjoy it and will happily lounge around the house in whatever is fresh off the catwalk. Being a pug he is somewhat rotund so these horizontal stripes probably aren’t the most flattering choice but he wears everything with a swagger and won’t be intimidated by society’s narrow definitions of beauty.

I’ve never seen a dog with more natural style and panache but looking back, the silk pyjamas and a smoking jacket probably was going a bit far.  Although the Fez was a master stroke.

This work is done using the suicide method of block printing. For this you produce a multi-coloured print using the same block, by progressively cutting away each colour. You end up totally destroying the block, so there’s little room for error and there’s no chance of ever doing a reprinted edition.

I printed wet on wet to get a slightly ‘fizzy’ surface texture and to encourage some colour mixing.

If you want to find out more technical details about techniques I use please click here to go through to the technical section.

The lino print “Pug In A Pink Sweater” is available for sale on Artfinder and if you’d like to find out more, please click on the link here to go directly to it or click on the top right of this page to see other works for sale.

 

Plumb Tuckered

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It’s been a long hard day of arty shenanigans. I started early this morning playing a ranting judge in a short film being made by friends. Then onto a second day of drawing in public at the Creative Bubble artspace in the city centre – I do this for a couple of days a month with the 15 Hundred Lives art collective. A quick bite to eat and off to a Halloween Shin-Dig nearby with some groovy people who have taken over an old shop and are developing it into a community cultural centre; early days yet but it looks very promising. I did some more spontaneous drawing there, some faces looming out of a long sheet of brown wrapping paper – well it is Halloween after all. And finally to one of the Elysium events – an open studio which was buzzing. A quick bit of blogging then off to bed because I’m plumb tuckered out. Goodnight 😀