Pontyates Piggahs

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Husb and I spent a happy few hours with Illtud and Liesel at their farm in Pontyates and I took the opportunity of sketching their pigs. Illtud also writes an excellent blog about being an artisan charcutier, but vegetarians might find it a bit much.

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I started off by sketching some of the little pedigree Berkshire piggahs during feeding time. They’re about 4 months old and they were not at all interested in the furless monkeys gawping at them and kept their noses firmly in their trough.

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It was weird drawing an animal I’m not used to. Mostly I draw people and cats and it took a while to get used to a new physiology. I tried scribbling with a Pentel V5 pen and also with black and white conte crayon.

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They’re short-haired piggahs, mostly black with darling little white socks and white splashes on their faces. They are remarkably dainty and walk around almost on tiptoe, like teeny piggah ballerinas. Some of these might be reworked as drypoint etchings in the near future.

Tomorrow, more Pontyates Piggahs.

 

Fanny’s Demise

13 Fanny

Had a really packed day and this afternoon Husb and I went to Swansea’s Central Library for a talk about Fanny Wollstonecraft, daughter of the 18th century feminist Mary and half sister of the author of Frankenstein, Mary Godwin-Shelley. I’d never known that she had died in Swansea, committed suicide at the age of 22. Dysfunctional families are not a new thing and Fanny’s awful upbringing was a tragedy waiting to happen. When she died, her family refused to claim her body, suicide being so scandalous, and the poor young woman was buried in a pauper’s grave in Swansea. Local historians believe her final, unmarked,  resting place is in the grounds of St. Matthew’s Church. I’ve known that place all my life, it’s where some of my family are buried, but until today I didn’t know that Fanny Wollstonecraft is also there.

It’s good practice to draw groups because it can be difficult to get the figures in the correct proportions according to the perspective. It’s also good to draw a range of ages and I was particularly fond of the elderly gent immediately in front of me. It’s lovely to draw that extreme age, loads of character. I used a variety of Faber Castell Pitt pens, sizes S, F, M and B into my A5 pink recycled sari sketchbook. This was one of a series of free monthly talks on local history at Central Library.

Wales covers area twice the size of Wales

Wales covers area twice the size of Wales.

Daft bloggage from Wales, always good for a giggle 🙂

Back To Basics

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I’ve been trying to push out of my comfort zone at Life Drawing group for a while now. Last night I pulled out a piece of very heavy and textured hand-made paper, a bit bigger than A4, that I’d prepared with acrylic gesso overlaid, when dry, with compressed charcoal and then sealed with spray fixative. The surface wasn’t smooth enough for any of my pens so fine detail was out. I grabbed a white oil bar and focussed on the basic shapes contained within the body.  This model is a larger, mature lady and she reminds me a lot of the sculptures I saw recently at the British Museum’s Ice Age Art exhibition. The heavy texture of the paper gives the surface a rock-like quality and it feels more hewn than drawn.

Doodlemum & Spiderboy

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I’ve been out and about a lot today and dropped in to Central Library to see my chum, Doodlemum, doing a doodling session with parents and children. A little boy painted as Spiderman was very interested in what I was doing.

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And here she is again being watched by two little sisters with their hair in bunches. Scribbled into my A5 pink silk sari recycled sketchbook with a Pentel V5 pen, size o.5mm. Then I went to a Demonstration to do some more scribbling, but that’s tomorrow’s blog.

A Quickie At The Cinema

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Finally got to see The Hobbit at our local independent cinema, The Taliesin. I just had time to scribble this man and his hair before the lights went down, the glasses went on and I went back to my childhood. I read the Hobbit when I was about 10 and loved every word of it. I really like the film version and I’m looking forward to the other two parts. Though I couldn’t suss out which role was played by Barry Humphries until I got home and googled it. A far cry from Dame Edna! This is scribbled into my A5 pink recycled sari sketchbook that I bought really cheaply in a sale in WH Smith a while back, using a Pentel V5 drawing pen. It took about two minutes.

Bath And Beyond

07 bradford onavonAnother lovely day so we headed East over the border into England to visit friends and stopped awhile in Bradford-on-Avon,  a bit beyond Bath. We’d often driven through and wanted to stop, because it’s ridiculously picturesque, so today we finally took a walk around. It’s very old and the buildings cling to the steep sides of the river valley, some of them going back to the seventeenth century. We had a traditional Sunday roast in a local pub and while we waited I sketched through the ancient window. It took about ten minutes using Faber Castell Pitt drawing pens, sizes M and B, onto a piece of mountboard, prepared with a white gesso ground with a random ink wash sponged over. Then a few white highlights added with conte crayon.

Quickies In The Garage

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I scribble anywhere, me. Had a slow puncture in my back tyre so I took the opportunity to scribble some men at work. They do their jobs really quickly in the garage so each scribble was just a few seconds. But it’s useful to sketch some positions I don’t normally see, like using the jack and kneeling to fix the tyre. The angle of the leg and boot in the kneeling position I found particularly hard, but it’s all good practice. Drawn into my A5 pink silk recycled sari sketchbook with a Pentel V5 drawing pen.

Vivid Pink

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I’ve been re-using some experimental work I’d been doing, that I wasn’t happy with. I’ve been taking the boards, prepared with rhodamine red and lemon yellow oil pigment, to different places. I took one to my weekly life-drawing session yesterday and drew this 30 minute pose in black and white conte crayon with a few highlights at the end in white oilbar. I like the foreshortening in this pose and I think I’ll probably be using it as the basis of other pieces of work, maybe a large monotype?

I love Rhodamine Red. I had a tin mixed for me, it was expensive but it goes a long way. When the pigment is applied thickly, it’s a very deep rich red but thinning with plate oil or linseed and it becomes a rich vivid pink.

Cake And Foreshortening

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So this evening I took myself off to life drawing at Swansea Print Workshop, bearing an abundance of cakes for our tea break. How civilised is that? I did a couple of sketches in oil bars that I was quite pleased with, then we had this pose to finish up with after tea and cake. It was the hardest pose I’ve ever drawn. The foreshortening was horrendous. It took me an hour to get this far. I’ve used Winsor & Newton oilbars and conte crayon to do the black line. I’ve worked onto thick card primed with two coats of acrylic gesso.