I did these three studies a while ago. I wanted to try out different approaches with the same approach, so I did one with compressed charcoal (it’s quite choppy); two with ink and pen, one right handed and one left. The two done with my right (normal) hand are a better likeness but there’s a liveliness to the left-handed sketch that I don’t get with my normal hand.
Commensalis, Bath, 2013.
Zantedeschia Aethiopica
….or the Arum Lily. I have a clump of them in my little wildlife pond in the garden and as it was such a glorious afternoon, I popped out and sketched for 10 minutes or so. I don’t like being out longer becaue I’m a gingery Celt and burn in the sun.
I have been pasting pieces of ripped brown wrapping paper into my sketchbook, to break up the tyrrany of the white page. I drew the outline with a Faber Castell Pitt drawing pen, size F in sepia and worked up the layers of white with Winsor & Newton drawing ink and a dip pen. The background has a smudge of white conte crayon and each spadix coloured with W&N yellow drawing ink.
More Kitteh Scribbles And Food Porn
Got almost to the end of the day without doing ANY art. So I grabbed the piece of kitty scribbling I started the other night and carried on with it. Sparta was mooching around on MY chair so I did a few scribbles of her and then just played with my old-fashioned dip pen and Indian ink, enjoying the scratchiness of the flexible nib across the heavily textured Bockingford paper. It’s so unpredicatable, unlike the Faber Castell Pitt drawing pens I normally use which are smooth and consistent.
And here’s the food porn – freshly baked elderflower shortbread made with our home-made elderflower cordial. I used 4 ounces of plain flour, 2 ounces of white Spelt flour, 4 ounces of softened butter, 2 ounces of castor sugar and three teaspoons of elderflower cordial, all squished together and rolled into 16 little balls and squidged onto a baking tray and baked at Gas mark 3 for about 12 minutes.
Bristol And The Beeb
Husb and I went over the border to Bristol today for a delightful day at Spike Print Studio, where three exceptional printmakers did a series of demonstrations and talks about their practice. We walked along the riverbank up to the Mud Dock Deli for lunch and sat upstairs on the mezzanine while I drew the punters queueing at the counter. The foreshortening was severe and they were all sorts of odd shapes.
I made visual notes during the demos by Aoife Layton (mezzotint and digital drawing), Fiona Kelly (contemporary block print and lino etching) and Ros Ford (from drawing to photopolymer intaglio). I also scribbled some of the faces there. Now I’m home, chilling to BBC 3’s excellent Glastonbury coverage.
Spreading It About.
Like many artists I have to do lots of different things to make ends meet and I sometimes work with adult drug and alcohol addicts, developing educational and social skills through creative expression. Which is a bit of a posh way of saying I teach art. I thought I’d show some of the work my students did on the last course. Althought he emphasis is on self-epression, the course is very structured and includes a lot of the history of art and culture. We kicked off with ‘Corps Equise’, a technique used by Dada and Surrealist artists and poets in the early 20th century to release their creativity, including Dali, Magritte, Andre Breton, Valentine Hugo and Paul Elouard.
Then we moved onto cave art and tribal art. I really like the work they did; it was great to see their confidence in what they were doing increase with each session and also kindling an interest in different historical periods of art that they’d had no previous knowledge of. I’m passionate about art; not just about creating it but also spreading it about because it can bring such beauty and interest into peoples lives.
The Felinheli Protocol
Hilarious comedy blog from this Welsh wit. Can’t wait for the next instalment. And I have seen the sleeping giant of Abercrave!
Keep At It
Just back from life drawing at Swansea Print Workshop. I did five drawings over 2 hours and each one was better than the last. It’s not unusual to be a bit rusty at the beginning, but you’ve got to keep at it and not get demoralised. Below are the first four drawings and above the final one. The blue ones are done on discarded cyanotype prints – not mine, I rescued them from the bin at the print workshop. I drew the others onto some nice handmade paper I bought at the Tate Gallery shop, pre-coloured with a sepia ink wash. I used a traditional dip pen and black and white Indian ink by Winsor & Newton.
Singing In The Shower
I like singing in the shower. I’m not trying to impress anyone, just singing away for the fun of it, so there’s no pressure. Sometimes I do that with drawing; not often enough to be honest. When I was a kid I doodled all the time but now I always seem to be trying to produce something ‘good’ or finished or polished. So I just chilled out tonight and did the scribbling equivalent of singing in the shower.
I used my dip pen and Indian ink onto a piece of recycled Bockingford that I’d stained with a soggy used teabag (no expense spared here) and just doodled away. Sparta wandered in and sat around cleaning herself so I scribbled away at her as well. I got right into ‘The Zone’, enjoying the scratchy feel of the pen onto the thick textured paper, playing with speed and pressure and just going with the flow. Drawing for fun and relaxation – I should definitely do it more often.
Industrial Scribbling
Sunshine all day – yaayyy Summer at last. ‘The Industrial Valley’ is the theme for an exhibition coming up in the Autumn for members of Swansea Print Workshop. Some of us are organising a series of drawing days to do preliminary studies for this and today a small group of printmakers went up the Dulais Valley to the National Trust site at Aberdulais Falls, one of the first areas to be developed during the Industrial Revolution. I normally run a mile from doing landscapes but I need to push out of my comfort zone and stop being lazy. Two ink sketches in my A5 cloth-bound sketchbook and a piece in oilbars, onto A2 stretched paper prepared with multi-coloured washes of acrylic paint.
scribblah 