Here’s another digital study of a head that I drew at life drawing last night at Swansea Print Workshop. I used my Samsung Galaxy Tablet Note 8 with a free Markers app.
I wanted to blog it yesterday but the Internet has been terrible for the last 24 hours and has just come back.
Following on from yesterday’s post about my latest reduction monotype, this is the ‘ghost’ image that is formed by putting a second piece of paper through the press after the first image is taken off the perspex plate. This gives a paler, ethereal monotype, where the pigment has broken up into little grains, rather like an Impressionist painting. Some French Impressionist artists, notably Degas and Monet, were said to have used this technique and worked into their ghost monotypes with oil pastels. I’ve tried this and it works really well, but you need to use best quality artist’s soft pastels; cheaper, chalky ones don’t work and they fade. The original was an impressionistic landscape drawing I did during a visit to Pakistan earlier this year.
Spent a happy few hours at Swansea Print Workshop this evening, making another small monotype based on one of my pastel landscape drawings from the residency I did in Pakistan earlier this year. I did a series of 49 small drawings very quickly, so they are very impressionistic. This is based on one of the drawings done during a thunderstorm. This monotype technique is called stacking or reduction monotype and it produces a full-colour unique print. It’s where painting and printmaking cross over.
Working from a black and white copy of the original drawing underneath a perspex plate, it’s first inked up in process yellow and drawn into with all sorts of equipment; cotton buds, scrim, cocktail sticks, kebab skewers, stiff paint brushes; then a print is taken. This is repeated with the plate inked up in process red and placed on top of the yellow print and put through the press. Finally, the same is done with the perspex inked up with process blue and the last print taken – the three are stacked on top of each other. You can read more about it in the technical section of my website here.
I’m moderately pleased with this one, but I need to practice my brush techniques because the colours are a bit too bright for my liking. I intend to carry on doing these for quite a while, so I’m hoping I’ll improve.
Husb ran the Swansea Bay 10k race yesterday and I sat on the promenade with my back to the runners, looking at the beach. It was a gorgeous day, we’re having a glorious Indian Summer and the sea was sparkling. I did some scribbles into my leatherbound Steampunk sketchbook, practicing drawing figures in a crowd.
I usually work with solitary figures so it’s quite a challenge to get the proportions right when there’s so many of them. As I was drawing, I began to appreciate the effort and skill shown by artists who work with crowd scenes, like Seurat and his huge painting of La Grande Jatte. It’s not easy. I sat on the grass, concentrating hard and Husb ran the 10k in an hour. Result.
Here’s another of the digital drawings I did during life drawing at Swansea Print Workshop a couple of evenings ago. I like working with this older woman model. Her face and body have lived life and are so very interesting to study. I prefer to work with older models and male models, to break away from the traditional young, comely female nude in a passive pose. They’re the ones that tend to get into exhibitions and to sell but I don’t really want to go down that route. The art museums of the world are full of nudes like that, usually painted by male artists and I am trying to find a different way of portraying the human body; to get away from soft core erotica.
I used my Samsung Galaxy Note 8 with a free Markers app, creating a dark ground to work over and using my finger for much of the line work.
I’m a member of an artist collective, 15 Hundred Lives and we have been running a monthly public art event at the Creative Bubble artspace in Swansea, we take the space for two days a month to work together as a group – a painter, a collagist and a printmaker / scribbler. I’ve been working on a series of very large drawings that will eventually form an installation. Here I am up a ladder.
My technique is evolving as I work on each drawing but that means they’re taking longer. The first two took a couple of days each but this one is still less than half done after 2 days, but that’s OK. It will take as long as it takes. Drawn on Fabriano Accademica paper 240 gsm using compressed charcoal and graphite block. Two days working on a large drawing means sore feet and aching shoulders, so I went for a curry this evening, to our favourite curry house, The Vojon, for a Handi Lamb Polongwala and sag rice. Sublime.
I arrived early for a meeting with the art collective so I went for a coffee by the Waterfront Museum. It’s on the old dockside which has now been gentrified and is full of galleries, coffee shops and interesting nooks and crannies. The late summer weather has been amazing, warm and sunny and dry, so I sat outside and had a bit of a scribble with my beverage. There are still a few large-ish boats moored by the dock.
Just back from life drawing at Swansea Print Workshop with a new digital life drawing done on my Samsung Galaxy with a free Markers app. This is one of our older models whose face and body are full of character built up over a lifetime of experience.
It’s quite late and the TV is full of the Scottish Referendum on independence which took place today. I’m going to try and keep awake to see the results, but it’s been a long day so I don’t know if I’ll succeed. Whatever, by breakfast time we’ll have the result. History in the making. Exciting times.
I’m a member of an artist collective, 15 Hundred Lives and we have been running a monthly public art event at the Creative Bubble artspace in Swansea for over a year now. September is our 13th event. We take the space for two days a month to work together as a group – a painter, a collagist and a printmaker / scribbler. We also invite a different guest artist each time to work with us. This month we’re joined by Tim Hanks, who creates three-dimensional form in wool that he spins himself.
We open the space to the public because we want to show what it takes to make a work of art. People see art on walls in galleries and often have no idea what goes into it, so we decided last year to let people see for themselves how it’s done. If you’re around in Swansea city centre on Friday or Saturday, please drop by and see what we’re working on. It’s Creative Bubble, Cradock Street, Swansea.
I spent the evening at Swansea Print Workshop, doing some monotypes. This technique stacks three coloured plates on top of each other – in yellow, red and blue. You can read more about it on my technical web page here. The technique gives one full-colour piece and one ‘ghost’ monotype, taken from a second pressing. Unlike most printmaking processes, you can’t make an edition of these. They are unique.
I developed the image from one of a series of drawings I did on my artist residency in Pakistan during April. We were travelling through the Punjab and I did almost 50 sequential pastel drawings, impressions of the landscape, atmosphere and weather surrounding us. I wasn’t sure how to develop these drawings. I edited them into a short film , ‘Drawn Punjab’ and now I’m going to make a series of monotypes.
I usually do monotypes of the human form, not landscapes or atmospherics, but I’m reasonably pleased with this first one. I can see what I want to modify so I might do it again and use stiff brushes to soften it and maybe use more blue. We’ll see.
scribblah 