More Paintingy Drawingy Stuff

I carried on doing the paintingy drawingy thing today. I stapled a bit of gessoed canvas to the wall and started rubbing Daler Rowney System 3 acrylic pigments, thinned with screenprinting medium, onto it with my fingers wrapped in rags. The original is a life drawing I did earlier this year. It’s odd using paint. As a printmaker and scribbler I’m used to doing a process in one go. It’s weird for me to have to hang around to let paint dry before I carry on to add a bit more. I’m enjoying the technique, though, it’s free and expressionistic and quite fast.

I rubbed in a cherry pink at stage 4, white at stage 5 and then drew into it with willow charcoal in stage 6. Next step is to consolidate the drawing and develop the colours and details with Winsor & Newton oil bars. I was a bit more sensible today and went for a 5k walk after I did some work on this. Yesterday, I went out earlier and corpsed myself walking 7.5k and was too tired to work on the painting / drawing afterwards.

The Tiniest Scribble

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Today was hectic. So packed I didn’t have time to think. I only managed a tiny little sketch, a few fleeting minutes in a cafe. But any drawing is good. The important thing is to do it every day. In my opinion. I used a Faber Castell Pitt drawing pen into my A5 leatherbound Steampunk sketchbook. Which is cool.

 

One of the reasons I didn’t have much time to draw today is because Husb and I went for a stiff 7.5k walk along the Swansea Bay seafront. It’s so beautiful and the weather was glorious after last night’s storm. Autumn has been fabulous so far. I’m lucky to live here. Did it in an hour and a half, bit slow, need to speed up.

Paintingy Drawingy Thing

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Today I had an urge to use paint. I’m not a painter. I don’t get paint but I really fancied using some earlier. So I stapled a bit of gesso-ed canvas to the wall and rubbed it all over with a yellow ochre acrylic pigment, put on with rags. It dried pretty quickly so I blocked in some reddish colour and once that was dry, rubbed on some green. I don’t like brushes.I don’t know if it’s a painting or a drawing. I’ll be putting in details with oil bars, which is definitely a drawing medium.

I did the life drawing above about a year ago, using oil pastels into a khadi paper book, opened up to use the double spread and this is what I’m using for reference.

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I’ll carry on with it tomorrow and see what happens.

Deckle Edge Ghost

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Here’s the ‘ghost’ of the monotype I completed yesterday. It’s made by putting a second piece of paper on the plate and putting it through the press again to pick up what’s left of the ink. The ethereal image is very impressionistic, almost pointillist as the pigment fragments on the second pressing. I used Caligo oil based washable litho / relief inks in Process Yellow, Magenta and Cyan plus Extender onto BFK Rives 250gsm paper. It’s a gorgeous one with a deckle edge, very fine, smooth surface. It’s the best for this technique.

Thunder And Rodents

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Just back from an evening Open Access session at Swansea Print Workshop where I did the third in a series of impressionistic monotype landscapes based on the residency I did in Pakistan earlier this year. This is one of a sequence I drew in a thunderstorm.

Had a tough day. Sparta Puss the evil-kitty-from-hell, terrorised me by bringing a live rodent into the house. It was a relief to get away to do some printmaking. And now I’m tired.

What Am I Up To?

Here’s what I’ll be getting up to in October. As well as blogging, of course 😀

What Am I Up To?.

A lovely blog reposted ‘The Simple History of Mario’

This is a truly lovely blog, very inspiring

The Simple History of Mario.

Slate Cliffs And Bara Brith

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Husb and I spent yesterday walking with friends along Newport beach on the North Pembrokeshire coast. Apart from the exceptional beauty of the place, it’s notable for the variety of wild birds along the estuary and the rugged vertical slate cliffs. I stood with my back to the slate cliff and quickly sketched the headland and the beach in front of me. I used Daler Rowney soft pastels into a small Khadi handmade paper sketchbook.

Afterwards, back at our friends’, we sipped tea, nibbled on home made bara brith and browsed through some books on Kyffin Williams’ landscape drawings. Inspirational.

The Dead Rabbit Mystery

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Husb and I visited friends in north Pembrokeshire this afternoon and went for a long walk along the estuary and beach at Newport. I was surprised to find this broken corpse of a wild rabbit on the sand. It was a sad sight and I looked away at first but then decided to sketch it. The body wasn’t marked or torn in any way, although its eye sockets had been picked clean. We wondered how it had got there. A fox or dog maybe? But it hadn’t been gnawed or worried. Dropped by a bird of prey? It wasn’t a baby rabbit, but not fully grown either, so that’s a possibility. We’ll never know.

 

I drew into my leather-bound Steampunk sketchbook with a Faber Castell Pitt drawing pen, size S. It took about 3 or 4 minutes. It seems a bit gruesome drawing a rabbit corpse, but there’s a tradition of painting dead animals in Northern European art.

A Body In Space

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Here’s another digital study of a female nude I did at this week’s life drawing group at Swansea Print Workshop. It is a quick sketch, about 10 minutes, where I concentrated on siting the body within the space. I used a Samsung Galaxy Tablet Note 8 with a free Markers app.

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