Husb has been turning my digital drawings into short videos, showing how the sketches develop from nothing to completion. I’ve been drawing on a Samsung Galaxy Note 8 using a free Markers app and Husb has used Adobe Premiere Pro to edit them. This is one I did from a drawing by Raphael. Sometimes it’s useful to to make some studies from great artists. It’s good practice and aspirational.
I’m cracking on with the series of screenprints I’m doing on dead women artists. This is my edition (of 25) featuring Paula Modersohn-Becker. In the next week I’ll complete editions on another 5 artists, eight in all. I’ll be taking them to sell at the London Art Car Boot Fair the weekend after next. So I’d better get my skates on! That’s Richard The Bird in the background.
Husb and I spent a pleasant couple of hours at the Riverside Folk Club in Loughor last night and it was a good opportunity for a scribble. Folk musicians tend to move around less than heavy metal bands, no headbanging, so I had a bit more time to draw them. I did a couple of quicker sketches at first, trying to include the guitars but they didn’t work out too well. I need to get someone to pose for a longer time with a guitar, or several poses, to get used to drawing an instrument from different angles. I switched to sketching heads and it was better.
I drew into my A4 hardbacked sketchbook that I’d prepared by sticking ripped pieces of brown wrapping paper onto pages with a Pritt stick. I used black graphite, a Faber Castell Pitt drawing pen, size M, and white conte crayon. The music was good too and I’m not a folkie type, more of a metal head. Enjoyed it though.
Just back from the Riverside Folk night at Loughor Boat Club where I had a few scribbles. This is one of them. More tomorrow, it’s late and I am off to bed now in a minute. Good night zzzzzzzzz 😪
Richard The Bird has come back for a holiday. His trained monkeys are off on their travels again so he’s having a vacation with us and the kittehs. He has already established who’s boss and we hairless apes are definitely bottom of the pecking order. He’s just taken a bath in his waterbowl and pelted me with some of his nuts and a piece of mango. Ming the Merciless is nonplussed, nothing distracts her from the boiler and the food bowl. Sparta Puss is prowling around looking for a way to get into his cage, but it’s built like Fort Knox. So I’m expecting some animal mayhem over the next few weeks.
I managed a couple of quick scribbles with graphite into my A5 hardbacked sketchbook. It’s a bit disconcerting because most animals (except cats) don’t like being stared at, which is necessary for drawing them. But this one stares straight back at me!
This is a 10 minute sketch of fellow artist Chris Harrendence who is one of the 4 members of The Plebeian Scribblers and we spent a day last weekend doing ‘live’ drawing in Fringe Arts Bath. We had a set amount of time split into 10-minute slots. Once 10 minutes was up, we changed position and went onto another 10-minute drawing. We did 10 drawings each, quite a body of work for one day. It was boiling hot and very tiring but worth it. We had loads of people stopping and looking at what we were doing, we’re all very committed to taking art out of white cubes and into public spaces. The other Plebeian Scribblers are Patricia McKenna-Jones and Melvyn Williams.
I used a selection of graphite sticks and Faber Castell Pitt drawing pens into an A4 hardbound Daler Rowney sketchbook. It’s a challenge to work in such a formal way, normally I cast around and choose what I want to draw carefully, but this time we were given a specific street to work in and we had choreographed our positions so we had to draw whatever was in front of us during each 10 minute stint. Sometimes I was just looking at a shop window full of advertising and merchandise, so I did a couple of drawings of reflections and some of adverts, not normally what I’d choose to do. We all thought it was worthwhile though so The Plebeian Scribblers might live to draw again!
I printed up and the two silkscreens I have been working on for the last week or so. I’m doing some editions from drawings I made of some of my favourite artists starting with Suzanne Valadon and Käthe Kollwitz. They’re small enough to print at home, if they were large I’d have booked the vacuum press at Swansea Print Workshop. I improvised a drying rack with my clothes horse. It worked perfectly well. I’m making a series of these to take to the London Art Car Boot Fair in a couple of weeks, I’m aiming to do eight artists. I’ve never taken my work to anything like this before so I don’t know what to expect. Exciting though.
We have some family sprogs on a sleepover tonight so I made a huge amount of pancakes. There seems to be no limit to the amount of pancakes that small children can eat. They like weird fillings. I’m old school – lemon and sugar will do me. The sprogs however are far more adventurous – cockles, duck and maple syrup went into one, duck, honey and lemon into another. And they want more for breakfast!
A great artblog from Melanie Ezra with news of an international miniature print show that has travelled from the North West USA to The Rhondda Valley
Husb and I took off in the car and headed into West Wales today, through the fleshpots of Lampeter and the mean streets of Aberaeron, all the way to Aberystwyth to see the Shani Rhys James retrospective at the National Library of Wales. It’s a fair old journey so we stopped for a bit of dinner at Lloyds in Lampeter, who advertise “the best chips in Dyfed”. They were well tidy and they were served with the best mushy peas I have ever tasted and two very tasty faggots with onion gravy. I had a quick scribble of the elderly lady on the next table who ate her chips with one hand and held her newspaper in the other.
Shani’s exhibition is fabulous; there’s only a couple more days left but a lot of the work will be appearing in a new show at the Millenium St. Ives in Cornwall soon.
Here’s a short video of my drawing of Sparta Puss, step by step. It’s a digital drawing done on a Samsung Galaxy Note 8 with a free Markers app. I saved the drawing frequently and then Husb edited it together on Adobe Premiere Pro with a free soundtrack from Purple Planet.
She was in a strop when I drew her and kept staring at me, which was great for sketching but I don’t know what I did to offend her. But that’s the story of my life.
scribblah 