Puddings Together

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It’s been horrible weather today. Winter has finally arrived; cold, wet, blowing a gale. Just the weather for making a steamed Golden Syrup sponge pudding with lashings of custard. It’s a pretty good survival strategy for a British November. Settled down for a bit of TV after the pud and the kittehs, Ming The Merciless and Sparta Puss, cwtched together on the footstool. It’s very unusual for them; they generally try to pretend the other doesn’t exist, but I think they must have been feeling the Winter chill too.  I did a quick scribble of them into my tablet Samsung Galaxy Note 8, with a free Markers app.

Random Heads

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Went for a walk to Mumbles with Husb and the Little Nephew today. The weather was crazy, alternating between warm sunshine and gale force winds and driving rain. We found a greasy spoon caff and piled into traditional fried breakfasts. It was enough to carry me through the rest of the day. Won’t need anything until tomorrow’s breakfast now. I sketched heads around the cafe at random, just a couple of minutes on each. I used a Faber Castell Pitt drawing pen, size F into my A5 Steampunk leatherbound sketchbook.

Boy In The Dark

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Babysitting a little nephew this evening and we’re watching films in the dark. There’s just enough light to pick out his features.

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Developing A Head

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Here’s another portrait drawing I did at Swansea Print Workshop’s life drawing group last night. I’ve saved the drawing regularly to show its development on my Samsung Galaxy tablet. I used a free Markers app and put in a dark ground to start with, working over it in lighter tones.

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Quick Head

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Just back from life drawing at Swansea Print Workshop. I did this very quick head study using the free Markers app on my Samsung Galaxy Tablet Note 8. I used the smart stylus and my fingers to get the different textures.

Ghost. Cake.

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Yesterday I posted about the new monotype I made, based on a drawing from my travel sketchbook. The monotype process produces an unique piece in full colour, but it’s possible to put a second piece of paper (BFK Rives 250 gsm) through the press and take a secondary ‘ghost’ print which is much paler and more ethereal. The prints are taken in sequence, first the Process Yellow, then the Process Magenta and finally the Process Cyan. Some of the Impressionists, notably Degas and Monet, used to use ghost monotypes as the basis for some of their pastel drawings.

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I had visitors this afternoon. So I made cake. A classic Victoria Sandwich with my homemade loganberry jam. I grow the loganberries in my garden and on our allotment, I’ve never seen them for sale. Husb is piling into what’s left. He takes no prisoners!

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Drama In Rags

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Yesterday I blogged some drawings I’d based on my travel sketchbook during my artist residency in Pakistan earlier this year. Today I developed one of these sketches into a full colour monotype down at Swansea Print Workshop.

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The technique involves inking up a perspex (plexiglass / acetate) plate with oil based printing inks and removing the lighter areas of the image you want to create. It’s a drawing process using all sorts of materials to make marks. In this series of landscapes inspired by the Pubjab I used cotton rag and scrim (tarlatan) for the mark making. This forced me to be very free as I couldn’t do any fine detail and this in turn created a much more dramatic image than I usually do. I’m pleased with the direction I’m going in with these. For more information about this technique, please click here.

Different Direction

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I spent April this year in Pakistan, on an artist residency. It’s taken a few months for me to make sense of the experience. It’s so different to my everyday life in Wales and the art that has been developing out of it has been very different too. I normally work with the human form, either as nudes or figures within cityscapes, but I’m now developing abstracted landscapes based on fleeting impressions I made in my travel sketchbook. I’ve been reinterpreting the sketches in monotype and in more considered drawings, in soft oil pastels onto heavyweight black paper.

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I’ve just framed up this set of four drawings for the Xmas show at Oriel Ceri Richards in the Taliesin Arts Centre. It opens on Friday November the 7th and runs until December the 23rd. These were based on fleeting sketches done during a spectacular thunderstorm on the road between Rawalpindi and Lahore. The colours were extraordinary, totally unlike anything I’d seen before.

Staying In

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After helping out with painting walls at the new Workers’ Gallery in Ynyshir yesterday, today was much more restful. The clocks went back last night so we had a rare lie-in this morning and a lazy day, clearing the last of the runner beans off the allotment – we picked a carrier bag full! Guess what we’ll be eating all week? I also picked kale, chard, rocket, French sorrel and a few straggly carrots.

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So this evening we are cwtched in front of the TV, in our pajamas and I have Sparta Puss on my lap, conveniently placed for a bit of a scribble on my Samsung Galaxy Tablet Note 8 with the free Markers app.

Up The Workers

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I spent a happy day in the Rhondda village of Ynyshir, helping to paint the walls of the village’s new artspace, The Workers’ Gallery. Artists Gayle Rogers and Chris Williams are renovating the village’s old library and will be opening Wales’ newest art gallery next month.

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I nipped outside and stood in the drizzle, having a scribble, looking down the grey stone and slate street at the fiery bracken on the mountain opposite. And I had a bit of a scribble inside too.

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I drew into my A5 leatherbound Steampunk sketchbook with a variety of graphite blocks and Faber Castell Pitt drawing pens. The village name, Ynyshir, is Welsh and translates as Long Island. Ynys is an ancient word, similar to the Irish and Scottish words for island, Ennis and Inish.