The Awesome Henge

18 Henge

Driving back from Brighton at the weekend in the sunshine, we travelled cross-country to avoid the hell of the motorway and to appreciate our glorious countryside. We took the A303 past Stonehenge and stopped to do a drawing and some photos. Husb had been before but it was my first visit and it is truly awesome. I’m not using that word frivolously. I was overcome with awe. How on earth did our ancient ancestors move those huge bluestones from the Preseli Mountains in Pembrokeshire in West Wales to the middle of England?

Here’s a bit of trivia. There’s a small parish in Pembrokeshire called Saint Elvis and the anglicised version of Preseli is Presley.

Drawn into my A5 pink silk recycled sari sketchbook – I’ve nearly finished it – using a Faber Castell Pitt drawing pen, size F in sepia.

Elderflower Scribbles

We stayed with friends just outside Brighton and got up early on Sunday morning to walk up to the cliff top and explore the green lanes for elderflowers. We make elderflower cordial every year but a couple of years ago had a problem getting one of the ingredients. In Boots the Chemist, Husb asked an assistant (who looked like she had just left school) for some citric acid,

Assistant “What are you going to do with it?”
Husb “Make elderflower cordial.”
Assistant “What’s that?”
Husb “Cordial made with elderflowers. Why are you asking?”
Assistant “Because drug dealers use it.”
Husb “Well, I want to make elderflower cordial so can I have some citric acid please?”
Assistant “Sorry, we don’t sell it anymore.”

Luckily, our local Asian grocer sold it in large bags on the spice rack.

I had to scribble very quickly, focussing only on the most important lines to capture the movement in my pink recycled sari sketchbook (size A5) using a Faber Castell Pitt pen, size F.

Early Bird

16 pigeon

Just got back from our visit to the seaside near Brighton, a six hour drive, and time for a quick blog. This is a pigeon that was snaffling wild bird seed from the feeder in my friends’ garden this morning. It was too big to stand on the pegs on the feeder, which is meant to be for tiny birds, so it clung onto the wire attached to some outdoor lights.

It was one of those pigeons with a white patch around their shoulders. I was up very early and the garden was buzzing with wildlife, loads of different birds, a squirrel and Mango the cat. Drawn with a Faber Castell Pitt drawing pen, size F, into my A5 pink silk recycled sari sketchbook.

No 7 Egon Schiele (for Rosie)

Art quote of the day by ‘Notes to the milkman’

No 7 Egon Schiele (for Rosie).

Kittiwakes And Kitteh Sleeps

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Having a spot of time away on the South East coast of England and went for a walk in gale force winds (although it was sunny) to Splash Point at Seaford Head to see a colony of Kittiwakes, who arrive every year around Easter and leave, according to local lore, the day before the Eastbourne Airshow. The wind was so severe that I could only spend a few moments scribbling; the high tide was crashing around me as well. Here’s the little sketch I made of Kittiwakes clinging to a large rock in the ocean a few yards from the massive chalk cliffs.

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And then back indoors out of the gale and my friend’s kitteh sleeping in a shaft of sunlight.

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Drawn into my A5 pink silk recycled sari sketchbook with Faber Castell Pitt pens, sizes S and F in sepia.

Doldrums

14 doldrums

I did a lot of artwork when I was in the USA last month but since I’ve been back I’ve really been in the doldrums. I’ve had the artist equivalent of writer’s block and the past few days in particular have been very frustrating. I realised today that I just have to get off my backside when I’m in that mood and scribble – it doesn’t matter what, it doesn’t matter if it’s good, bad or indifferent – just get stuck in and get my hands dirty. I felt a lot better afterwards, like taking exercise. It’s easy to forget that art is a very physical process as well as a cerebral one and it’s easy to spend too much time thinking, reading and researching.

I almost always work from life, so it was a bit odd to do these drawings from ‘my head’ but maybe I should do more; other artists work from within so perhaps I should give it a go. I scribbled on some huge pieces of paper that I found jammed into a bin down the print workshop a while back. Someone had over-soaked them and they were falling apart so I rescued them, stuck them onto a huge board and sized and coloured them with rabbit skin glue and yellow ochre acrylic paint. Today I scribbled on them with compressed charcoal, carbon and chalk. It doesn’t matter if I look at them tomorrow and don’t like them; I can just rub it all down and start again.

Prelims

13 ben 1

Just got back from life drawing group at Swansea Print Workshop. I tried something different this week. I worked onto an A3 sheet of canvas that I’d prepared with a rhodamine red oil wash. I drew in charcoal and oil bars (black, white and translucent) but it was very difficult to do any detail on that scale. The pose was also more challenging than it looked with some quite severe foreshortening on the right knee. It was a one-hour pose and I spent the last 5 minutes quickly sketching the feet in pen to get some detail down into my A5 pink silk sketchbook.

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I’m pleased with the face and I’ve got the proportions right on the figure and the foot details, so they’re good enough as preliminary drawings and I can see some scope in working from them and making a much larger piece, something quite dramatic I think.

The Columbian

12 colombian

I spend the afternoon at Swansea Print Workshop but didn’t have any plates or blocks ready for inking so I did a spot of drawing instead. This is our lovely old Columbian Press, dating from 1855, with one of our artist/printmakers inking up a collagraph in the foreground.

It’s drawn onto a sheet of stretched Bockingford, sized with rabbit skin glue and coloured randomly with acrylic washes in red, blue and yellow. I used willow charcoal for initial sketching and carbon, white oil pastel and white chalk with a smidgen of yellow oilbar to work it up. It’s A2 size (23.5 x 16.5 inches; 60 x 40 cms).

I was well out of my comfort zone, drawing interiors and machines, although I managed to get a human being in. It’s hard to draw a machine without making it look like a technical illustration so I’ll keep grappling with it.

Ow! Ow! Ow!

11 owowow

I’ve done a lot of walking today, trying to find something to sketch but I was so distracted by the pain from the hideous gnatbites over my legs that I couldn’t find anything that sparked me enough to stop and draw. So I went home, sat down and drew my painful pustules. I’m trying not to take any antihistamines until bedtime because they zonk me out in the day.

I’ve drawn this in my A5 pink silk sari recycled sketchbook with Faber Castell Pitt drawing pens sizes S, F and B in sepia with Vermilion and Deep Red Winsor & Newton Drawing Inks applied with a sable brush. I’ve tried to express the pain by using quite jagged mark-making.

Now I’ve done my blog, I can take the medication zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Allotment Gnats

10 spots

We stayed too late on t’allotment last night and became fodder for swarms of gnats intent on eating us alive. Here’s my neck! The bites hurt! So I took some antihistamine medicine. The label warns that it may make some people drowsy. It’s knocked me senseless!!! I’ve been at sixes and sevens all day and I’m too woozy to draw so I thought I’d show you some of my sketchbooks.

10 sketchbooks

It’s been almost 2 years since I started blogging and here are most of the sketchbooks I’ve been using. The biggest are the two recycled sari silk ones, they’re about size A5 (about 8 x 6 inches or 210 x 148mm). They’re all small enough to fit into a bag or pocket. I love sketchbooks – they’re such gorgeous little objects 🙂