He’s at it again. Husb is making a fitted cupboard in an alcove. I don’t know why he puts himself through it. He hates DIY. But it’s a very good opportunity for me to get in some speed sketching of someone in weird positions that you don’t normally see every day. I don’t mind if he suffers for my art. He reckons this cupboard is going to be ‘the dogs’. For non-British readers, that means rather pukka 🙂
I scribbled this in about 90 seconds. Good practice.
Carrying on from yesterday’s bloggage about the Drawn To Print project, I’ve been immersed in drawing today too. The drawing on the left is one I did a couple of years ago, on BFK Rives 250 gsm paper coloured with metallic System 3 acrylic and drawn in Faber Castell Pitt pens. I then used it to develop into a block print, cutting the design into an offcut of signwriters foamboard and printed in black litho/relief oil-based ink onto Zercoll 145 gsm. Today, I used the print to develop another drawing, using a dip pen and Indian ink onto Fabriano Accademica 120 gsm. And next…..? Why, I fancy a screenprint. This could keep on going and going………
There’s an interesting programme running at Swansea Print Workshop [SPW] at the moment, involving three residencies from international printmakers who base their art practice on drawing. It’s called Drawn To Print. As well as a print studio set-up, SPW also has a thriving life-drawing group and many artist/members who use their drawing skills extensively in the production of their original prints. As I do. I like to work directly from models in the life drawing sessions, usually directly into a sketchbook, then I rework the drawings, scaling them up to the size of my monotype plate (which is a posh name for my bit of perspex). Because I like to keep the drawings as original pieces in their own right, I usually do a very basic tracing of the form and use this beneath my perspex plate as the basis of my monotype.
The technique I use is here on my website. This is a young model who is also a soldier. He’s an excellent model and I’ve done a lot of work with him.
Excellent idea for school holiday rainy day game for harrassed parents……….
3) Print it.
[If you don’t have a printer, you could just bring the full picture up on the screen, but don’t blame me if you end up with a sticky monitor.]
4) Stick the picture onto something solid like a piece of card.
It would probably be a good idea to laminate it, or cover it with some clear sticky back plastic. [I so could have been a Blue Peter…
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Went to see a fab band at The Garage the other night, The Peatbog Faeries, part of Husb’s birthday present. They’re sort of a fusion of Scottish folk/rock with trance/ambient undertones, overlaid with bagpipes. Fantastic. A get-up-and-bop-all-night band. I ached the next day! They were supported by a young local folk band, Thistledown. It’s good to see a new generation of young people making their own folk music. And it’s good for a scribbler to get to see lots of hairy faces! All in one place. They’re a bit of a pain to draw though 🙂
Still struggling to draw children – they’re soooo weird. Funny little faces squished into great big heads. And they won’t keep still. And you’re not allowed to tie them to chairs. Nanny State Nonsense! 😉
Just some faces scribbled when I’ve been out and about the place. The older man was scribbled this morning as I was having a nice cuppa with my friend in Waterstone’s bookshop cafe while we were waiting for Illtyd the Charcutier from Pontyates to deliver our sausages and faggots. mmmmmmmmm
This evening was a bit overcast but warm, so we took a drive to Oxwich Bay on the Gower Peninsula, one of the most beautiful beaches in Britain set in Britain’s first designated area of outstanding natural beauty – and just a short drive away.There is a long road down to the beach, down a steep hill with some spectacular bends at the bottom, sweeping around large areas of saltmarsh. When I was a young biker, local lore had it that in the dim and distant past, a local motorcycle racer went for a spin on his new Velocette racing machine in the moonlight, took one of the bends too sharply and spun out of control into the saltmarsh, where he and his motorbike lie to this day, never seen again. It was said that during a full moon, the sound of a ghostly Velocette engine could be heard carrying over the marshes. I can remember a few of us riding down to Oxwich one night, after a few pints. I was young and very scared of the dark. We didn’t hear anything.
The tide around here goes out a long way and the beaches tend to be shallow, so when the tide is fully out, you can walk miles and explore the shoreline from the sea side rather than the land side and see lots of quite steep exposed rocks with wonderful rock pools, covered in many different weeds and full of anemones and fish. Here’s Husb looking down into one of them. The limpets make the smooth rocks look spotty.
ps I’m not advocating drinking and riding. I was young and daft when I did it.
I’m getting quite pally with the elderly man in the hospital bed next door to my relative. He’s what my Nana would have called, ‘Not Backward In Coming Forward’ and quite right too. He’s worked all his life and he’s entitled to what he needs in order to remain independent. His eyesight is now very poor so he mobilised the relevant people and had a visit from the optician a couple of days ago. He showed me the catalogue they left with him. “I can’t read it though, bach, I think they missed the point“‘ and laughed uproariously. However, he managed to make out a very comprehensive list of what he needed and showed me some of his booty bag this evening. Impressive haul. Here he is listening to one of his new audio books, happy as Larry. 🙂
I spent the day at Swansea Print Workshop doing a short course in subtractive drawing with the new artist-in-residence, Aoife Layton. Pretty hard going, partly because it’s very different to the way I normally scribble, using a fine pen into an A6 sketchbook. Today we used A2 cartridge that had been prepared with three coats of rough gesso. We had to coat one with charcoal, rubbing it in well with our hands – lovely and messy! The other was coated with graphite block which was then wiped in with a rag soaked in white spirit. We used an odourless one, but there isn’t a satisfactory alternative to white spirit.
Then we had to begin to remove the black pigment with various drawing materials such as sandpaper, wire wool and craft knives. We had a variety of objects to choose from for our subjects including a large sweet jar full of dried corpses of lobsters and crayfish. I used some of these, Still Deads rather than Still Lifes. The top drawing is the charcoal one, the bottom, graphite. I think the one below looks like some strange crustacean Danse Macabre.
When I was in school, we were taught to always fill the page with a drawing, but these days I prefer to position the image carefully within a space, isolating and emphasising it.
scribblah 