Had a hectic few days and I’m behind with my blog so I’m playing catch-up. I went to a small relative’s brithday party recently and the family dog decided she loved me. So, unwilling as I am to pass up any opportunity for a cribble, I sketched her. She was very fidgety because the room was full of small children, eating. And, of course, dropping food on the floor. What an ideal situation for a dog. She’s a medium sized sturdy mongrel with wiry, sandy hair.
Greetings hairless apes. Sparta Puss here. The bald monkeys have been rushing around like idiots for the past few days. They say they’re on holiday but then they go and do loads of D.I.Y. which is hard work, stressful and they are grumpy all the time. But what do I care? I don’t have to do it. I don’t have to do holidays either, because my entire life is a holiday.They are idiots.
So the she-ape says, “sit by the fire, Spartypants, and pose for me”. So I move over to the door and turn my back on her, because she’s an idiot. She says it’s work. I say, “Who’s she kidding, eh?” And what’s with the nickname? Spartypants, Spartykins, Spartypie, Puddypants YEEUURRGGHH! She’s an idiot.
This is her ‘work’ 😉 She rubs bits of paper in a book with no words with a dirty stick and calls it art. Idiot.
Husb and I were given free tickets to the cinema this evening, ‘The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty’, with Ben Stiller. I’m not a big fan of Stiller and hated the original ‘Walter Mitty’ film with Danny Kaye but this turned out to be a really good movie. I thoroughly enjoyed it, especially as a lot of it was set in Iceland, one of my favourite places. There was a huge queue in the foyer so I grabbed the chance to practice drawing a group, always good for perspective and proportions. I find it easier to focus on one person to start with and then work out from him / her. Then I pick out that person in a slightly thicker pen to finish off. I used Faber Castell Pitt drawing pens, size F and M into my clothbound A5 sketchbook.
This is another piece currently in an exhibition, one of the drawings I’ve overlaid on top of solvent transfer prints. The image in the background started as a digital photograph of some strange markings on the city’s pavements. Every so often, a machine goes around the city, scrubbling chewing gum off the paving stones. This leaves odd patterns and I was there with my camera to record some of them. Then I zipped them through Adobe Photoshop Elements: Filter: Adjustments: Posterise. Once they’d been transferred using acetone and an etching press, they give an ethereal look. It’s odd sometimes where artists get imagery from.
Here’s a piece I finished earlier this month for the exhibition I’m currently in at The Brunswick in Swansea. It’s a combination of a solvent transfer print overlaid with a drawing that started life in one of my sketchbooks. I went to an avant garde theatrical piece by Marega Palser, who also does performance drawing, and sketched this when she sat out for a while as other dancers performed. She wore strange, oversized hairy slippers. The image in the background is a piece of graffiti on a very old factory building, part of Swansea’s Industrial Revolution past. The exhibition runs until next March.
Not mine this time. I often scribble my feet when I’ve reached the end of the day and I haven’t done a daily drawing, but today I drew the feet of my chum and fellow artist, Melanie Ezra. Poor Mel tripped earlier in the week and fractured her foot. Today, she kindly offered me her feet to draw. The unfractured one is very slim and pale pinky-white but the broken one is swollen, misshapen and livid colours. It’s far more interesting to draw someone else’s feet.
I used a piece of Bockinford 250gsm paper, pre-coloured with yellow System 3 acrylic paint mixed with a little acrylic medium. I drew with black conte crayon and Winsor & Newton oilbars in white, cobalt blue, crimson and hookers green rubbed with a rag dipped in linseed oil.
It’s been a tiring week but after tomorrow I’ll be able to have a bit of a break from arty stuff and enjoy some time off. On Wednesday evening I was at the opening of a group show I’m in at The Brunswick. It’s been a long haul as I have work in 2 other exhibitions at the moment and it’s been a lot of effort to get all the pieces finished and framed. But it’s all done now.
This is one of the pieces in the show, ‘The Grand Dude Rocks’, a transfer print overlaid with an original drawing based on a sketchbook scribble. I saw this chap when I was visiting at the hospital last year. He was rocking on his headphones. Brilliant. 😀
…..and some days you don’t. And I just couldn’t get a handle on life drawing tonight at Swansea Print Workshop, so I switched from the full figure to a portrait, which worked better.
This first figure was a fairly quick pose, about 10 minutes. There was a high spotlight on the model, throwing strong shadows, so I tried to focus on the chiaroscuro in the figure rather than linear detail.I’ve used a heavily textured hand-made paper that’s given a very fuzzy surface. I pre-coloured it with blue-black drawing ink and drew with black and white conte crayons.
My next drawing failed completely and I’m not even going to show you! I switched to this portrait that took about 35 minutes, again focussing on light and shade. It’s a lighter, smoother paper, pre-coloured with pink and blue-black acrylic paint. Again, I used black and white conte crayon but added some extra strong lowlights with carbon.
I’m reblogging this from Collect Connect’s blog because it shows my piece for the Cardboard City art-trail along London’s Southbank. Hope you like it 🙂
http://collectconnect.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/rose-davies-palace-corner-advent.html
I had an early start today and walked across the city to do some shopping to make cakes for the exhibition opening tomorrow and on my way back I spotted these two men asleep on the pavement down a side street. It was about 9.15 am and I was quite shocked. There’s one regular street person who tucks himself down every evening; he’s been doing it for decades and refuses offers of housing, preferring to live on the streets. But I’ve never seen anyone else out in the open like this. There are all sorts of reasons why people might be in this situation, but really, in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, it isn’t right. Why haven’t we cracked this problem yet?
On a lighter note, I’ve just finished the lemon butterream cake for tomorrow’s opening party for the group exhibition I’m in – the chocolate brownies can wait until tomorrow. I’ll post photos in tomorrow’s blog 🙂
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