The Artist’s Feet

14 feet

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.

The Grand Dude Rocks

The Grand Dude

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. 😀

 

 

Some Days You Got It…..

…..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.

12 ben 1

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.

12 ben 2

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.

Cardboard City art trail – it’s my turn!

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

 

Street Sleep

10 street sleep

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 🙂

 

Shades Indoors

09 shades

Why? What’s the point? Maybe some people have medical reasons to wear sunglasses indoors, but surely not as many as I see out and about. This middle-aged dude was in Waterstone’s cafe where I stopped for a pot of tea and a scribble. He had fancy wrap-around style shades and a smart leather blouson jacket.

Drawn in my clothbound A5 sketchbook with a Faber Castell Pitt drawing pen, size F.

New Direction

crib sheet image

This morning I was helping to set up my new exhibition at The Brunswick in Swansea. I’m showing with members of an arts collective I’m in, 15 Hundred Lives, and we’ve put together a show of painting, photomontage and drawing / printmaking. I’ve done something new for this exhibition.  For years, I’ve been wandering the streets with my sketchbooks, a set of drawing pens and a digital camera, recording what I see in front of me. This combines my digital images with my sketchbook drawings. I made solvent transfer prints of the digital work onto top quality art paper and then, using my sketchbook drawings as my source, I drew on top of the transmuted imagery, either with traditional dip pens or Faber Castell Pitt drawing pens.

The original drawing here was done while I was queuing at the Civic Centre. These two women sat opposite; I think they were related. The transfer print in the background was taken locally in Wind Street and then digitally manipulated before being used in the solvent transfer process. It’s a big change from the nudes that are normally my subject matter and the monotype and blockprinting processes I usually use in my work. It’s an interesting new direction for me.

In Dylan’s Park

07 cwmdonkin

Had a lovely day, first at Uplands Outdoor Market, bought loads of wonderful local produce and some hand-made Xmas presents – result! Then picked up the little nephew and went to ‘A Child’s Mystical Xmas’ in Cwmdonkin Park.  It’s just around the corner from where Dylan Thomas grew up and he played in it throughout his childhood; it features in some of his work. The old bandstand has been turned into a very nice little cafe where we sat outside, it’s surprisingly warm, and had tea and Welsh cakes; I resisted the Christmas Pudding with Joe’s Icecream advertised on the chalkboard. I sketched the boy with his hot chocolate. He’s 9 now and his features are changing quickly, he doesn’t look so much like an alien and his nose is almost an adult shape.

Later on, we made lemon curd for more Xmas presents and Husb and the boy decorated the Xmas tree. Sparta the cat subverted them every step of the way. She’s delighted to have a tree to climb indoors 😦

Opposable Thumbs?

06 sparta

Greetings, apes. Sparta Puss here, on the ‘pooter box. The bald monkeys that I live with keep banging on about these opposable thumbs of theirs, like it’s such a big deal, and waving them at me and Ming the Merciless and laughing. Well, here’s the thing. They need the opposable thumbs to open the cat food pouches. And to make the factory that makes the cat food. And to build the warm, cosy house with the central heating and beds that I require for living in. They’d be useless servants without opposable thumbs and Ming the Merciless and I would have to kick them out. So I don’t know what they’ve got to be so snooty about. Idiots.

The she-ape has sticks with dirt in that she rubs over bits of paper and then says that they look like me. She’s an idiot.

Allotment Scribblers

05 allotment

Husb and I have an allotment and we went to the site’s annual general meeting last night and I was really surprised to see two other scribblers there. So I pulled out my sketchbook and scribbled them scribbling others. We have been growing lots of fruit on our plot, but the soil is heavy clay and we have struggled to grow veg. We’ve been building raised beds but they need a lot of filling, which is why we’re often going off to farmyards and stables, shovelling up sacks of manure to enrich our soil. It’s really hard work and I appreciate farmers much more since we’ve had it.

Our plot is behind Oystermouth Castle, built in the twelfth century. We are so used to castles littering our landscape (Swansea has two) that we take them for granted, but they’re quite spectacular really and Oystermouth is a particularly lovely one. Swansea City Council has done a lot of renovations in recent years, including an art gallery and it gets a lot of visitors. At this time of year, when there are no leaves on the trees, the castle is visible from the plot and it’s a great place to spend a few hours.