Trying Hard

 

Sprog-sitting my adolescent great niece today and I get my money’s worth by making her pose for me. I find it very hard to draw kids – they have weird scrunchy faces in big heads (that’ll make me popular LOL) but the only thing to do is try harder and practice, practice, practice. The one on the RHS is the last one I drew and probably the one that looks most like her, but they all have elements of her. Hooray for laptops – kept her relatively still and quiet for ages. Better than bribing her with chocolate. There’s also the little tinkly bell attached to my lovely purple silk recycled sari sketchbook, drawn with my Pilot V5 – it sounds so macho doesn’t it? Like a jet engine 🙂

…The Cats Will Play

 

Hiya. Sparta Puss here. I’ve managed to get my paws on the Pooter Box again while the fur-less monkeys aren’t paying attention. I’ve been having such fun with one-eyed Ming The Merciless who shares the idiot apes with me. The simian slackers went for a day out yesterday and, well, to paraphrase a well-known saying, “While the apes are away, the cats will play.” And boy, did we play.

First off, we wee-ed on the kitchen floor …. tee hee …… And then, I caught a rat and let it loose in the house ……. hahahaha ….. And THEN, Ming the Merciless vomited all down the back of the central heating boiler, too far down for them to reach to clean it up …. WAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAAH…… 😀

It was sooooo funny when they came home and ran around flapping their arms and shrieking and mopping up cat wee and setting rat traps and cleaning up rat droppings and trying to get down the back of the boiler and failing and then burning scented candles all night so they didn’t retch. It’s enough to make a cat laugh. And we did!

A Couple Of Quickies

 

Husb and I had a grand day out today, with a roadtrip to Nottingham via Hay-on-Wye and Coventry. As we were sightseeing, I didn’t want to spend too much time sketching so I set myself time limits. Nottingham has an amazing geological rock formation that has been there for about 400,000 years. It’s called Castle Rock – it’s a large rock with a castle on it :).  The sandstone is very soft and over the years people have carved caves into it. I spent 8 minutes scribbling a section of it which contains three caves at the bottom.

Then we called into Coventry on our way back home. Close by the magnificent new cathedral and the old cathedral ruins is a small street called Cuckoo Lane and I scribbled this little medieval timbered house in 5 minutes. Both are in my purple silk recycled sari sketchbook with my Pilot V5 pen. And now we’re home and chilling out. Lovely.

Step One: Tea

The new blog by the new resident artist at Swansea Print Workshop – great stuff!

 

Step One: Tea.

Sunny Sunday

It’s been a difficult few months, with the worst summer in living memory and serious illness and deaths of people dear to us but ….. fingers crossed…… things seem to have calmed down a bit and last Sunday we spend a delightful afternoon in the unexpectedly warm weather, visiting Limeslade with an elderly relative. We had ice cream in the lovely old Fortes cafe and sat and watched the sea crashing over the rocks in the sunshine. Gorgeous. I scribbled this couple across the road from us, engrossed in looking at the view.

I don’t find it easy to draw landscape; I concentrate on making marks and hope for the best. I used my favourite Pilot Hi-Techpoint V5 pen into my A5 recycled sari sketchbook, used across the two pages.

Another New Model

 

It’s a season of new models at our life drawing group; a new female model last week and a new male this week. I had fun with the pastels then did some smaller studies of his hands and feet. It was a one hour pose with some serious foreshortening – I’m a glutton for punishment.

 

Fat Knees

 

Was on my feet all day at Swansea Print Workshop, editioning some photopolymer plates and PVC block prints. I couldn’t wait to soak in a hot bubble bath when I got home and then settled down for a night with the TV and newspaper. Except the cat, Sparta, took over my legs and I had to scribble her! And my fat knees 😦

More Kitteh!

 

Been very busy with work and family for the past week or so and had little time to get out and scribble, so I’ve taken the easy way out and scribbled Sparta Puss who obligingly dosses around the place looking picturesque. It’s hard to keep a fresh approach to a subject that you draw so often so I’ve started getting into the mark-making for its own sake, even if it means abstracting the subject. It helps me to look at the subject in a different way. So here she is, drawn with a Pilot Hi-Techpoint V5 pen (size 0.5) into my recycled purple sari A5 sketchbook, which has little glittery bits flecked through the pages.

Scribbling Sparta

Haven’t done a scribble of Sparta Puss for a while, mainly because she’s so consistently naughty that we spend most of our time with her chasing the mice / rats / birds she brings in to rescue them and get them out of the house! But this evening she was in a very sweet mood and cwtched up next to me on the settee – where she was promptly scribbled!

Drawn with my Pilot Hi-Tecpoint V5 pen (size 0.5) into my purple silk recycled sari A5 sketchbook.

Square Eyes

 

Husb was sitting in a dark corner using his laptop earlier and the screen was reflected in his specs, making his eyes look quite square. So I scribbled him.

By the way, he chose to sit in a dark corner. It isn’t some sort of naughty step type punishment. Honest 🙂