Hell And Cake

I HATE shopping. It’s my idea of hell, unless I’m buying books or tools. I had to buy some new clothes to replace some that were literally falling to pieces so I spent two hours in shopping hell (Dante knew nothing…NOTHING…) and bought two pairs of leggings, a t-shirt and a sports bra. Result. That’s me sorted for the summer.

04 cakes

So when I got home from shopping hell, I made the mistake of having a sit-down in front of the telly with a nice cup of tea. Note to self: do NOT watch reruns of The Great British Bake-Off during the day. I don’t particularly like eating cake but I LOVE baking. And Mary Berry led me astray. So instead of working diligently in my studio, I ended up baking a Victoria Sandwich and loganberry cupcakes. Husb scoffed two cupcakes then begged me to take the rest to life drawing this evening, to save his waistline. But that’s another blog……

Crazy Woman In A Sandstorm

03 sandstorm

So who was the mad woman on the freezing cold beach in a gale force wind this evening, drawing in a sandstorm? This crazy woman here, that’s who. Honestly, the things I do for my art. It was blowing so hard that my piece of card, around A3 size, was waving about like Rolf Harris’ Wobble Board. That dates me doesn’t it?  I’ve been working my way through pieces of card I’d been experimenting with. They hadn’t worked out so I’m reusing them.This had a lemon yellow oil pigment ground and I worked over it this evening with Winsor & Newton oilbars.

I scribbled frantically in the gale for about 8 minutes, not easy and I certainly wasn’t happy with what I was drawing. Then the wind blew the board clean out of my hands and face down onto the sand, just like buttered toast. It started looking better. I got it home and, using a cotton bud (Q-Tip), scribbled into the sand on top of the wet pigment. I quite like it now. I think the sand looks very realistic 😉

Artistic License In Buckets

02 hot bay

It’s been a gorgeous bright, sunny day, although very cold, so Husb and I headed for the beach this evening for a spot of scribbling and fresh air. I re-used a board that was a failed experiment. It had some images in rhodamine red oil pigment overlaid with lemon yellow and I wasn’t happy with it so I dug it out of a cupboard and scribbled over it in oilbars – yellow ochre, white, ultramarine and black, thinned to varying degrees of translucency with the neutral oil bar. Finally I put in some marram grass with Hooker’s Green.

Now here’s where the artistic license comes in. This is Swansea beach. In Swansea weather. Under a Swansea sky. So if anyone’s tempted to book the next fight to this red hot landscape, forget it. I’ve substituted the searing pinks and oranges for various shades of grey. It’s not a bit like this really. But I’m an artist so I can do it. Ner ner nerner ner 😛

Tatts And Transparencies

01 acetate 2

I’m preparing a whole new set of photopolymer plate intaglios. I’ve chosen the sketches I want to make plates of, mostly from my sketchbooks and now I’m drawing them onto small (A6) transparencies. These two here are onto Mark Resist. It’s considerably cheaper than TruGrain and more stable than tracing parchment, especially with wet media.

This is one of our group’s older models, a retiree with lots of tattoos. I’m using a traditional dip pen and Indian ink to do the linework and on the one above, I’ve used conte crayon over a sheet of rough sandpaper to get the textured background.

01 acetate 1I’m using black oilbar to do the background on the second one, with a sable brush dipped in turpentine to work around the edges of the lines. The backgrounds need a bit more work then I need to do some tones on the bodies. In the past I used Indian ink wash but water-based media don’t seem to take too well onto acetate, so for these I think I’ll experiment with black oil paint, thinned to a wash with turpentine. It’s easy to remove if I make a mistake. Once the drawings are complete, it’s off to Swansea Print Workshop to use the UV unit to create the plates.

Hoody And Hat

31 beach

We’ve been cooped up for months so as it was bright and dry, but very cold, earlier today, Husb and I went for a walk on the beach. I wanted to get out and sketch en plein air and blow away the winter cobwebs. I sat down in the dunes behind a couple of people who were huddled up together in hoody and hat, sheltering from the wind. I did about 7 minutes scribbling onto an A3 piece of mountboard, prepared with 2 coats of acrylic gesso, using white, yellow ochre and black oilbars, overlaid with a splash of blue oil pastel. It was very sticky and I threw a handful of sand over it to finish it off. Had a terrific appetite by the time we got home.

A Fractal Scribble

30 mandelbrot

We were shopping at one of those drab out-of-town retail estates and I stopped for a quick scribble of two ugly metal sheds with a tree in between. It’s not easy to draw trees but I picked up a tip a while back. The branches grow according to fractal mathematics and that’s the key to drawing the branch structures. I only did a very quick scribble the other day, but I’ve tried spending longer on a drawing of a tree, building up layers of fractal drawings and it works well.

The maths behind fractals began in the 17th century but became popularised in the 1970’s when Benoit Mandelbrot found a way to visualise fractal mathematics through computer graphics.

 

Oily Scribbling

28 oilbar

I went out of my comfort zone again tonight at life drawing and used my new yellow ochre oil bar to lay a scribbled base on top of an A3 card I’d prepared with 2 coats of acrylic gesso. I’d normally work with very fine pens, doing lots of linear detail. I prefer oilbars to liquid paint because I can draw with them, but there’s no chance of doing fine work.  I worked over the ochre ground with a black carbon bar and some chalky pastels in red, green and blue. The oily ochre base made the pastels glide over the surface beautifully giving loads of texture. Finally, I scribbled some highlights with a white oilbar.

Tired And Manky

step 1I spent the afternoon at Swansea Print Workshop, editioning a photopolymer intaglio plate. First I cut 15 pieces of BFK Rives 250gsm paper and put them to soak in clean water. I set up my workspace around the hotplate that I preheated and put some Intaglio Printmaker’s drypoint shop mix oil-based ink in black onto the glass work surface and mixed it a bit with a mini squeegee to get it nice and malleable.

step 2

I spread the ink over the  photopolymer plate that I’d put onto the hotplate (with newspaper to keep the hotplate clean). Once it was well covered, I removed excess ink with the edge of a piece of stiff card then took the photopolymer plate off the heat and onto the work surface to continue removing the ink with a piece of washed scrim.

step 3

After a final polish on the areas I want to highlight, I cleaned the edges of the plate with a rag and put the plate onto the small Inverleith etching press. I’d already placed a registration sheet on the press bed and covered it with a piece of acetate to keep it clean. Then, using ‘paper fingers’ I took one of the pieces of paper, that had soaked for about an hour, from the tray.

step 4

I schlepped it against a white board and squegeed it once to get rid of excess surface water, then put it between several sheets of blotting paper and rolled it a couple of times so it was damp, not sodden.

step 5

Again with clean ‘paper fingers’, I placed the paper carefully onto the inked plate, put a piece of clean tissue on top then the three swansdown blankets and turned the wheel to take the whole lot through the press.

step 6

Phew! A perfect print. But I’m tired and manky. 🙂

 

Scribbling And Sponsorship

cat 5

I don’t work alone in my garret (I don’t have a garret), I like to work with other artists to develop exhibitions and projects. I’ve been a member of an artist collective called Commensalis for about a year now and our aim is to get our work out into the world because art is meant to be seen. But it costs quite a bit to do that and we don’t have any public funding.

cat 7

So we’ve decided to try out crowdfunding for our next show, in Bath, UK in July. There are five of us in Commensalis and none of us has done anything like this before, we’re learning as we go along. It’s an interesting way to get sponsorship. People pledge whatever they want and in return get a reward. It’s a lot of work to put a site together though, especially with five of us, collating information and images, making a ‘video’ and writing up some blurb without sounding like a bunch of arty pseuds. And also deciding on what rewards to give and then making them. Not as easy as it seemed at first. We’re nearly there though and hope to go live with our site on March 30th.

cat 4

These are my Scribblecats. They’re tiny direct-line monotypes onto archival-quality tissue, cut and mounted onto hand-made papers. They’re based on little sketches I made some years ago of two brother cats we had, the late, great Ffred and Sialco (pronounced Shalko). They were both semi-long-haired whites but Ffred was easily the most evil cat that has ever roamed the planet, and completely manky as well. Sialco on the other hand (paw?) was delicate, refined and gracious and always beautifully groomed. I’m doing 25 of these little monotypes for our crowdsourcing site.

PS our sponsorship site is now live and Scribblecats are offering themselves as rewards for our backers 😀

 

Partied Out Part 2

25 Neath

Back on Saturday night, after seeing the fabulous Bourgeois and Maurice in Neath, we decamped to a pub I hadn’t been in since the mid-’70’s. It’s one of those old heavy metal rock pubs, really dark and grimy with ripped seats, and walls and floors stained by the abuses of many generations of rock fans. There was a metal band at their headbanging best when we arrived but they soon finished and after some classic rock from the DJ at earsplitting volume, a really mediocre band came on so we left. When I was young I’d have been lubricated with plenty of beer and the bands would have sounded a lot better.  Funny that.

The pub was very gloomy and old, quite Gothic and it was interesting to draw a dark place in the dark, so a lot of it is sort of feeling my way round the paper rather than looking at it. It’s also the very last page in my blue silk recycled paper sketchbook, size A6 that I’ve really enjoyed filling. Drawn with a Pentel V5 pen, size 0.5mm.

Husb and I are such lightweights these days; we were home and cwtched in bed by 11pm 🙂