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 🙂

Partied Out!

24 maurice

I didn’t blog yesterday because I was out partying! Doesn’t happen often these days because I prefer to stay tucked up in a blankie on the settee in front of the telly – rock ‘n’ roll eh? A load of us went to the theatre in Neath to celebrate a friend’s birthday and we saw an hilarious comedy / musical cabaret act, Bourgeois and Maurice. That’s Maurice above. She was fairly easy to draw because she didn’t move round much – that’s important for an artist 🙂

Her brother, Georgeois Bourgeois, however, was much harder because he is a very physical comedian, throwing himself all over the stage.

24 bourgeois

I only had seconds to try and capture him. Then we went off to a really sleazy rock pub, but that’s for another blog 😀

International Women’s Day- A&E

A beautiful drawing from a relatively new blogger with a love of sketchbooks………

International Women’s Day- A&E.

Comfort Food

22 ben foreshort

Second day of Spring and what am I cooking for tea? Casserole and rice pudding. Proper Winter fodder because of the torrential rain, gale force winds and freezing temperature outside. No chance of a nice light salad for some time to come. Here’s another sketch I did last night at the life drawing group. It was very difficult to photograph because the Indian ink lines have reflected the light and gone white in some places. I also used white conte crayon for highlights.

Renaissance Head

21 Ben head

Just got back from life drawing at Swansea Print Workshop. Filthy night, really cold, pouring rain and blowing a gale……and today’s the first day of Spring. Joke! Anyway, our model is great to draw, he has a very Renaissance head and excellent muscle and bone definition. I previously used up some offcuts of mount (matte) board and schlepped white acrylic gesso and grey ink wash over them to break the unrelenting surface. This one was a mid grey to start with. I worked onto the board with black and white conte crayons. It’s fairly small, a bit less than A4.

More Manky Woman Artist #MWA

To carry on with yesterday’s theme of Manky Women artists, here are the steps to making a manier noir drawing which is deliciously grubby.

20 manier 2

I started by stretching large pieces of Fabriano 240gsm paper onto a wall, soaking them lightly. When they were dry I gave them 2 coats of acrylic gesso, leaving them to dry between coats.

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Then I prepared two with compressed charcoal, rubbing it in with my hands until there was an even black coat.  The third was scribbled with graphite block which was then smoothed with a rag dipped in turpentine.

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Here they are ready for ‘drawing’ which I do using wire wool and sandpaper, scraping the black away to reveal the highlights and tones.

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And here’s one of the drawings on compressed charcoal. When they’re finished I spray them with commercial fixer for charcoal and pastel. The charcoal and graphite give different blacks; the graphite has a silvery sheen while the compressed charcoal gives a much denser matt black.

20 manier 1

Manky Women Artists #MWA

19 gestation

I don’t often go on Twitter because it steals my life away, but I was on it for a while earlier today and shared a bit of a joke with some other women artists. We were all tomboys as kids and now we’re all grown up, we don’t do frocks and stilettos, fancy nails and killer heels. No, we slouch around in overalls, steel toecap safety boots and our nails are either full of ink and paint or chewed down to the quick. Manky Women Artists. MWAs, the new YBAs?

In keeping with the manky theme, here’s something I’m working on at the moment. I stretched some heavily soaked,  ripped and distorted Arches paper, about size A0, against a large board and gave it a couple of coats of rabbit skin glue followed by a quick wash in yellow ochre acrylic as the ground. Then I used willow charcoal and compressed charcoal, scribbling and rubbing at random to get a varied background. I scrubbed at it with wire wool and sandpaper to pull out the highlights and now I’m putting in shadows and details with blocks of carbon. I normally work from life, but I’m trying to plumb the depths of my imagination with this one. It’s getting a bit Goya. And mucky.

If you’re a manky woman artist, come and join in on Twitter #MWA. If you’re a manky male artist, oo-er! Best keep that to yourself 😀

His Life On A Trolley.

18 homeless

This is the last of my scribbles from London. It was a bitterly cold evening and as we were waiting at Paddington train station to come home, I saw this homeless man sitting in front of us, his life packed onto a supermarket trolley, including a walking stick. One of his legs was in plaster and he wore a comedy fake-fur tiger hat. He was a nice man, chatting companiably to people nearby, sometimes dozing and thankfully he wasn’t hassled to move on by station personnel. I don’t know what his story is, but no doubt our present government would say it’s his own fault for being poor.

Study Scribbles

17 BM1

I normally scribble my daily life in my sketchbooks but sometimes I use them for research and study. These sketches above are from the current Ice Age Art exhibition at The British Museum, showing some female figurines, a mammoth spear thrower and various carved patterns that may be derived from entoptic phenomena, or images that are seen when the eyes are closed, sometimes under the influence of trance or hallucinogenic substances. Richard Rudgely‘s book discusses this sort of imagery in Stone Age art at length.

17BM2I love Assyrian art and always visit that section in the British Museum. Their carvings and sculptures are very detailed and I sketched some decorative motifs (above) and these giant talons (below), part of a complex man/beast. The Assyrians were creating these hybrid creatures centuries before the more famous Egyptian examples.

17 BM3