Scribble At The Pictures

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I’ve had a rough few days with a stomach bug and not felt up to doing anything creative, not even some sketching, but today Husb and I treated ourselves to a visit to the cinema to see Avengers: Age Of Ultron. Loved it! I did a quick scribble before the main feature started. Looking along the row, the angle compressed the figures into a clump so I quickly drew them, concentrating on trying to get the proportions between the figures right. It was pretty dark, but that’s good practice. I drew into my A5 hardbacked sketchbook with a Faber Castell Pitt drawing pen, size F.

See How It Goes

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I’m going into a phase of experimentation for a while. I have been marbling some Fabriano Accademica paper with black oil pigment and turpentine and I left it out in the garden to dry out; it was quite smelly because of the turps. I forgot about it and it was out overnight and when I looked at it today, snails had attacked it, chewing out some small holes but also munching away at the surface, making it textured in places. Interesting.

I’ve been rooting through old sketchbooks, looking for drawings to work from and I quite like this simple one, done in an olive pastel at a life drawing session. I’ll use it as the basis for drawing onto the marbled paper, with different black and white media; graphite, willow charcoal, carbon, Bideford Black and oil pastel. And see how it goes…….

 

Return To Life

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I’ve been so busy with the series of silkscreen prints over the past few weeks that I haven’t been to life drawing at Swansea Print Workshop for ages. So back to normal this evening and I did this head study using my Samsung Galaxy Tablet Note 8 with the free Markers app.

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I saved the drawing frequently so that I could put together a slideshow of the different stages of development. I got really scribbly.

How Stephen King Destroyed My Childhood

Brilliant artblog, so funny with excellent illustrations

Waste Not, Want Not.

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So I was working with some fellow artists and one of them, a painter, chucked some black oil paint mixed with turps down the sink. Unfortunately, the sink was blocked so he filled it with water and squeezed some washing up liquid into it and suddenly it went all marbled. So, waste not, want not, I grabbed some of my Fabriano Accademica paper and threw it on top of the water and marbled my paper. It’s been sitting round for a few months and I’d just about forgotten about it until today, when I decided to do some drawing.

 

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I’ve been working on a series of silkscreen prints over the past few weeks, tight design and a very specific technical process and I wanted to get back to something intuitive, so I grabbed my marbled paper and various black drawing media: some willow charcoal, carbon, compressed charcoal and Bideford Black. And I got stuck in. I used an old life drawing very loosely as a basis and then got into the zone, moving the media across the paper, just letting it happen.

 

Tomorrow I Scribble!

Here’s a short video that Husb edited together from a digital drawing I did some time ago. I used a Samsung Galaxy Note 8 with a free Markers app and saved the drawing frequently, which showed the progress of the drawing. The model is a young artist who poses for our local life drawing group and I drew him about a year ago. It’s interesting seeing these digital drawings edited together, it gives me an idea of how I draw. I’m not aware of it at the time, it’s something I do instinctively.

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I’ve done very little daily drawing for a few weeks now; I’ve been so busy making a series of 10 screenprints based on artists that inspire me and there’s been no time for sketching. So tomorrow I’m back to wandering around with my sketchbooks and pens and a few lumps of graphite and some white conte crayon in my bag. Tomorrow I scribble!

Egon And The Paper

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Here’s the last of my series of screenprints of favourite artists for a while. I prepared a screen to take to last Sunday’s Art Car Boot Fair in London’s Brick Lane and started to print it during the afternoon. I used a different vintage paper to the one I used for all the women artists. I used a British made W.S.H & Co for Egon Shiele, no longer made unfortunately. It has a beautiful deckle edge and a slightly rough texture and is a silvery white. Gorgeous. Can’t get paper like this in Britain any more. Such a shame.

Prints And Paddington

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Today, Husb and I went to the Art Car Boot Fair in London, sharing a space with other artists from Swansea. I took a couple of silk screens with me to print. Here’s one of Jeanne Huberteurne, a French artist. It worked well. I am smiling 🙂

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We came back from Paddington Station and went to find the statue of Paddington Bear. He has been moved to under the clock on Platform 1. I stopped for a chat.

And Now The Chaps…

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I’ve finished a series of 8 silkscreen prints of women artists who inspire or move me and now I’m going to have a bash at the chaps. It’s been harder to source photographs of the male artists. A lot of them have been very formal, posed ones and so many men in the early twentieth century had large beards, which make them look a bit samey. There seem to be more photos of the women artists of the same era, a lot of them informal, family photos which has given me far more choice. Egon Schiele is an exception as he had a series of experimental photographic portraits  made and he also shaved! I’ve worked up a drawing onto the screen and worked onto it with Speedball Diazo drawing fluid using various sable brushes. It’s one of the screens I’ll be taking to the London Art Car Boot Fair (June the 14th) to demonstrate screenprinting, alternating with stencil artist Simon Dark. We’ll be doing our arty thing outside Dylan’s Mobile Book Bus.

Eight Women Finished!

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Favourite women artists

 

 

Here’s the complete set of silkscreens of 8 of my favourite artists that I have been working on for the past few weeks. I’ve done each of them as editions of 25, except for Frida Kahlo, I did 50 of her. I’m not sure why, I just really liked the brushwork on her screen. It was the last one I did and I was getting much bolder and less anal about applying the liquid stencil. I’ve got the bug now and I want to do more.

I was going to do some of my favourite male artists in this first tranche but when I researched images of them, most of them looked alike – they were mostly middle aged bearded Victorian men in black coats and white collars. Apart from Egon Schiele. So it’s back to the drawing board with the men. The artists above are Paula Modersohn-Becker, Kathe Kollwitz, Suzanne Valadon, Hannah Hoch, Camille Claudel, Gabriele Munter, Broncia Keller-Pinell and Frida Kahlo. I used a lovely vintage paper, handmade and deckle-edged by T. H. Saunders, sadly no longer made. They’ll be launched at the London Art Car Boot Fair in Brick Lane on Sunday. Please drop by if you’re up London way 🙂