hmmmm how many puns about hares can I get away with? 🙂 I’m still practicing drawing hares, alternating between the Samsung Galaxy Tablet and pencils. Another day or two and I’ll move onto another animal.
I visited the old Swansea Museum today. They have an exhibition on Alfred Wallace with some taxidermy including foxes and a badger, so I’ll take myself down there to draw from them, instead of photos, over the weekend.
Practice makes perfect. So I’ve been drawing and redrawing the little hare from the digital drawing I did yesterday. I’m doing these in Reeves pencils, B and 3B into my new little spotty sketchbook. It’s size A6 and my chum and fellow blogger, Melanie Ezra, brought it back from New York City for me. Here it is.
It’s cute. There’s a reason I’m doing all these practice sketches. There’ll be lots more to come over the next few days………
I’ll be working on British wild animals for a while; I’m not letting on why just yet,but expect more hares,some hedgehogs, badgers, foxes,red squirrels and maybe a Scottish lynx over the next couple of weeks. I’ll also be using my Samsung Galaxy Tablet to draw them,so I’ll be getting plenty of practice doing digital drawing.
Having a play with my Samsung Galaxy Tablet this evening, sketching from photos. I’m working in the free Magic Marker app and I quite like how I’m getting on with it. I don’t like the ‘Gallery’ on the Tablet though. The drawings get saved to the ‘Gallery’ but the edit function is extremely temperamental and it wouldn’t let me rotate this drawing, which was originally on its end. Try as I might, the ‘Rotate’ function kept refusing to work. So I emailed it to myself but then it wouldn’t open in anything! So Husb had a go for ages and just as he was about to throw the computer across the room, the darn thing opened up in Adobe Photoshop. Which is what we tried to do first!!!! I hate computers. Frustration doesn’t come into it!
Day 2 at the last 15 Hundred Lives art event at the Creative Bubble Artspace in December and I continued to sketch out some of the faces of women murdered in Britain during the year, 199 at the time. Unusually I’m using canvas and some paint, along with oil bars which I worked into the canvas with rags dipped in linseed oil. The idea came from Karen Ingala-Smith’s blog, Counting Dead Women. It’s a harrowing indictment on our society that we still have not come to grips with serious violence to women.
I rarely do portraiture or work from photographs, but I felt inspired to honour these ordinary women, whose lives have been so cruelly snuffed out. The idea behind the events at Creative Bubble is to have the space for a couple of days a month to try out new ideas. I managed to do the sketching and quite a bit of underpainting for four of the women, but a lot of people came into the artspace and wanted to talk about what I was doing. It seemed to engage people far more than the work I’d done in previous months. It took a long time to get to this stage and I haven’t got any further with it as it doesn’t fit in with my business plan, at least for the first part of this year, so the canvasses have been rolled up, waiting for me to come back to them.
I’ve been working with some other artists in a group called 15 Hundred Lives and we have been doing a 2-day monthly public art event for the past 5 months. We take over a fairly large artspace, Creative Bubble in Swansea and start a new piece of work, inviting the public to come in and see how we develop a piece of art from scratch. It’s been very good for me because I’ve been experimenting and doing things I wouldn’t if I was just plugging away on my own in my studio.
Working over a ground of yellow ochre acrylic paint
Finding inspiration is the hardest thing about being an artist as far as I’m concerned. Technical ability is improved by diligent practice but finding something to draw, print, paint, whatever is the hardest thing for me. But inspiration can come from all sorts of places. Just before the last Creative Bubble event in December, I was reading a newspaper article about a woman who has set up a feminist website to commemorate women murdered by men in the UK during 2013, many, but not all, victims of domestic violence. It’s called Counting Dead Women. I printed out the article and some of the photos she’d put on her website and spent two days working from them. I hadn’t been looking for subject matter like this but the article inspired as well as distressed me and here’s what I did on Day 1.
I found the article and the process of creating these portraits harrowing. It really started to bring the statistics to life for me. More tomorrow……….
Just back from life drawing at Swansea Print Workshop and I’m a bit out of practice. We had a three week break over the holidays and it was good to get back into the discipline of anatomical study. This post is a bit difficult so I redrew it until I was reasonably happy with it. I like the pose a lot and I will probably develop it into a mixed media piece or a print.
I used a traditional dip pen and Indian ink onto an A4 piece of Bockingford that had been prepared with an acrylic ground in orange.
Husb and I are staying up late tonight because there has been a massive solar storm this week and the Aurora Borealis might reach this far South. So far it’s a very clear night so we might get lucky.
Just back from the cinema, we went to see The Hobbit, The Desolation Of Smaug. It’s terrific. Did some quick scribbles of some of the audience. Male pattern baldness is very widespread.
Crazy spoof about superheroes existing in the REAL world of unending bureaucracy from the acerbic pen of Notsogreatdictator Smith.
There’s a lot of admin to do at the moment and trying to get fit after the Xmas excesses and the usual chores so it isn’t easy to fit in drawing time. In between doing lots of stuff today, I popped into Husb’s office for a few minutes. His window is opposite a row of old Victorian rooftops. I only had a short time, but it was enough for a bit of scribbling. I don’t think it matters what an artist draws each day,as long as we draw. Faber Castell Pitt drawing pens into my A5 clothbound sketchbook, which is now looking very tatty and well used.
scribblah 