This is my equivalent of a singer practicing their scales. It’s what underpins the ‘finished’ pieces that I hang in a gallery. Just mundane, quick, scribbly sketches in real time. It’s only a few minutes work but it keeps me fresh by focussing me on the essence of each figure. It’s not great art but it’s not meant to be. This is the daily practice of my craft.
Here are some more. With Sparta. Up to no good!
I like to draw older models because it’s interesting to see how anatomy changes with age. When I’m drawing, I often make mistakes and do a few sketches until I get it reasonably right. Here’s the first attempt (above) with notes about what’s wrong with it. I had another go and was happy with the second drawing, done in Faber Castell Pitt drawing pens, various sizes, onto Somerset 250gsm paper. I added colour with Winsor & Newton half pan artist water colours.
As I get over the lurgi, poor Husb goes down with it! He’s been looking after me for the past month and it’s my turn now. He needs comfort food so some home-made chicken and vegetable soup followed by a banana cake with Snickers cream. That’s two Snicker bars, melted with a pot of double cream, cooled and whipped and used to sandwich and top the cake. Then I grated another Snickers bar over the top. Here he is, poor dab, wrapped up in a blankie on the settee. Reeves pencil (F) into an A6 spiral bound hardback Winsor and Newton sketchbook.
My brain’s back! My body works! 4 weeks to the day since I went down with the dreaded lurgi I finally feel well again. Today was lovely and sunny, though cold, so we went down to the allotment, our first visit since November, the weather’s been too awful to do much. We dug up a load of leeks and picked a winter salad of spinach, mooli radish and wild garlic. Leek and potato soup and salad for tea. The rhubarb is already poking through the ground. Here’s a drawing I did of it this time last year, using Faber Castell Pitt drawing pens and graphite block.
Husb and I took a ride down to the Fountain Fine Art gallery in Llandeilo today to drop off 10 of my etchings for the forthcoming exhibition of emerging Welsh artists, opening on Saturday 23rd February. It’s been a fine, bright day and after so much time spent indoors recently because of the lurgi, it was nice to stand in the main street for a while and sketch some of the odd, quirky little buildings. It’s a lovely town, built higgledy-piggledy on a hill above a classic meandering river that winds through a lush green flood plain dotted with little oxbow lakes. It reminds me of school geography lessons.
Then we drove back along the A40 through Dryslwyn, Carmarthen and past Kidwelly, a glorious route, swinging by Saith Gallery in Burry Port which is showing a marvellous exhibition of collages by Melanie Ezra. They also serve excellent tea and homemade cake in their little cafe. Both galleries, and their little towns, are well worth a visit.
Drawn with Pentel V5 and Faber Castell Pitt pens into my A6 blue silk recycled sketchbook.
I’m getting better each day and I spent half a day at Swansea Print Workshop printing some of my etching plates. I used Intaglio Printmaker’s black etching ink (drypoint shopmix) and BFK Rives 250 gsm paper. I soaked it for about an hour and a half while I prepared some registration sheets and fixed them to the bed of the etching press, under a sheet of clear plastic. I got my workstation set up, with plenty of newspaper and some small sheets cut from Yellow Pages, washed scrim and set the hotplate to medium.
I put the steel photopolymer plate onto the hotplate to warm up and spread some ink across it with a small rubber squeegee, pressing it into the grooves. Then I rubbed it with a piece of soft, washed scrim in a circular motion until the excess ink had been removed and finally rubbed over areas I wanted to highlight with a cotton bud (Q Tip).
I cleaned my hands with vegetable oil then washed them and, using ‘paper fingers’, rtemoved a sheet of soaked paper from the tray and slapped it up against the white board. Then I squeegeed it to remove excess water, then put it between some sheets of blotting paper an rolled over the top to get damp, but not too wet. I put the inked-up plate onto the plastic sheet on the press bed, over it’s registration marks.
I placed the damp paper, again with ‘paper fingers’ over the plate, using the second set of registration marks, put some clean tissue paper on top and put the swansdown blankets over the whole thing. Don’t worry, they’re not made from real swans. Then I turned the wheel and put the whole thing through the rollers.
Then I took the print, called ‘The Towel’, off the plate and put it to dry between sheets of acid-free tissue between two fibre boards for a couple of days. It’s one of a number of my pieces going into a new group exhibition in Fountain Fine Art gallery in Llandeilo, opening on Saturday 23rd February. If you’re in the area, please pop in 🙂
Each day, the lurgi seems a bit weaker and I went to life drawing tonight, for the first time in a month! I only managed an hour but I did some quick pen and ink sketches, using a traditional dip pen and then I used chalky pastels and graphite block (6B) to draw this fabulous reclining pose. I love the challenge of foreshortening and this is a particular favourite model. This drawing has a lot of potential for development into a mixed media piece or a large monotype. I’m hoping to get back to the studio next week to get stuck into some serious art.
Still nursing the lurgi this morning so I was sat with my legs up on a footstool wearing my cool Magnum HiTec boots. Sparta Psychokitteh came along and stretched herself on top of my snazzy leggings. I’m a scribbler. So I scribbled her.
As I was drawing, I drifted off into ‘the zone’. This sort of repetitive, physical mark-making induces a kind of meditative state in me. I thought about the books I’d read and the documentaries I’d watched over the past few weeks while I’ve been ill, about paleolithic art and cave paintings in particular. Most of the art from the Stone Age is recognisably animal or human, but there are lots of examples of abstract shapes, grids, dots and dashes and a number of theories about them. One is that early artists were trying to depict entoptic imagery, another that they were drawing hallucinations caused by intoxicants or rituals. I wondered how many artists have been consulted in the formulation of these theories because when I’m in ‘the zone’ I get totally absorbed in the phusicality of drawing; the physical nature of making marks over and over again. Were the earliest artists in our species experiencing something similar? Hmmmmm.
Drawn into my A6 blue silk recycled sketchbook with a Pentel V5 pen, size 0.5mm and Faber Castell Pitt drawing pens sizes XS, S and B. (Sparta chewed the bead off the ribbon and I had to tie it back on and it’s skanky now!).
So very true LOL – little sketches of cats 🙂
The lurgi is still with me but I managed a couple of hours pottering today, showing an old friend some of my work in exhibitions, then I went home and crashed. It’s very frustrating because I can’t get the energy to do any artwork when I’m in this state. So here’s one I did earlier :).
I was doing some direct line monotypes in the studio a while back and as I started to clean the ink off the perspex, I liked the smudgy marks, so I quickly scribbled a figure in the corner with a cotton bud (Q tip) and took the print (a reduction monotype) onto some acid-free tissue I had hanging about, very gently smoothing it with my hand. I’d always thought that you needed a press to take a reductive print, but it depends on the thickness of the paper. Using really thin tissue worked quite well, so I’ll do some more experimenting with it – when I finally get rid of this dreaded lurgi!!!!!
scribblah 