Model And Me

I’ve been photographing and cataloguing all my old sketchbooks, no small matter, there are dozens. This drawing is 6 years old. I was still using drawing pens but working on size A3 and sketching not just the model, but the life drawing room and whatever was reflected in the large mirrors. Here I am in the background with my well-worn and well-loved Hi Tec Magnum boots. They’re the most comfortable boots I’ve ever had. I bought them in the Army and Navy store. They had trouble getting my size because they’re supposed to be for men and I had to have the smallest ones and still have to pad them out a bit with socks. They have lasted really well, very good value. I first saw them when I did some training with the local police force and most of the officers wore them. I thought they’d look really good with thick woolly tights and a skirt. The chaps didn’t think so! 😀

A New Male Nude [parental guidance]

Got home late from life drawing last night, too tired to blog and today I’ve been framing and mounting prints all day for next week’s printmaking exhibition at Oriel Canfas in Cardiff. Then this evening Husb and I went to the opening of this year’s MA show at Ty Bryn Glas – excellent. I think it’s the best MA show I’ve seen, consistently high standards and lots of well-crafted, considered and beautiful work. Definitely worth seeing.

Anyway, here’s our soldier model who posed last night. This was a difficult one to draw. I deliberately went for an angle that gave me some foreshortening; his left foot was quite close but he was leaning sharply away so his head was noticeably smaller. His hands took a lot of effort.  It’s got potential; I might rework this as I like the pose a lot. It’s drawn with chalky pastels and compressed charcoal into my A3 Bockingford sketchbook, using both pages.

Sneaky Scribbling

I was at a meeting yesterday and while I was concentrating [honest!] I snuck my sketchbook out and scribbled away under the table for a few minutes. I like doing these very quick, surreptitious little portraits because it forces you to identify and capture what it’s absolutely vital to record because you don’t have the time to do anything else. People tend to be talking and fidgeting as well, so it’s very good discipline to draw quickly and make allowances for a moving model. Excellent opportunity to practice.

Drawn in Faber Castell Pitt drawing pen size S into my Paperblanks A6 ‘Mediterranean Cats’ sketchbook. I’ve nearly finished it – I had it for Xmas and it’s lasted 6 months, good value. It’s a very pretty object in it’s own right as well. I’ll miss it.

Life On His Own Terms

Sitting on a public bench in the city centre at the end of a long day, waiting to meet Husb to walk home and watching other workers doing last-minute shopping and heading for buses and cars, I spotted a local character standing opposite, so of course I grabbed my sketchbook and had a scribble.

I won’t name him because he’s a gentle man who doesn’t like attracting attention, but I have seen him on the city’s streets now since I was a schoolgirl, when he was a young man who had chosen to give up a conventional lifestyle and live as a ‘tramp’ on the streets. It’s four decades on and he still chooses to live the same lifestyle. He’s very unkempt and he drags a large sack of his belongings wherever he goes, but he’s always seemed healthy enough and he’s friendly and well-spoken  in his quiet way and has never been known to harm anyone. Once he found a bag with £10,000 in it and took it straight to the police station, every penny, and even refused a generous reward from the money’s astonished owner.

I’ve noticed recently that he’s now very grey and looking a bit frail. It’s quite worrying but he shows no sign of wanting to come off the streets. He’s had offers of accommodation and the caring services have certainly been keeping an eye out for him, but he carries on with his chosen lifestyle.

He’s very well known and well-regarded locally, no-one seems to mind that he’s lived so unconventionally for so many years. Visitors to the city are sometimes shocked, because he does look a bit of a state, but those that chat to him quickly realise that he’s living life on his own terms. I’m glad I live in a place where such eccentricity is accepted and I hope he is able to continue with his chosen lifestyle for as long as he wants.

Discipline And Plotting

I’m an expressionist scribbler, preferring to draw freehand as much as possible. But now and again it’s good to get some discipline into my work to refine my technique. Here’s a plotted drawing I did a while back, using a very simple rough grid to plot the main points of the body and relate them to one another with some accuracy. These drawings will never be exhibited but they’re important, because they are the buidling blocks of our trade. These are the sort of things that most people never see – we show our polished, finished art but rarely the steps that lead up to it. I think that by not showing the practice pieces and the sketchbooks and the stages of development, we’re doing ourselves a disservice. How many times have we heard, “a child of six could do it”? Well, y’know, they couldn’t, because they haven’t spent years doing drawings like this to get things exactly right. So there 😛

 

Quick Kitteh Scribbles

Some days I really don’t want to draw. Mostly though, I grit my teeth and do it because I don’t want to fall into the trap of being undisciplined. That’s when the cats come in handy. They’re great for speed sketching because, unless they’re snoozing, they don’t keep still for long, they’re very fidgety little animals and that’s what you want when you’re only in the mood to do a few quick scribbles.

So today we had a window of about four hours between one load of torrential rain and the next, so Husb and I went and did some heavy-duty slogging down the allotment. I’d neglected the raspberry bed and it had been taken over by buttercups. Now if anyone goes ‘aaahhhh, lovely’ let me tell you that no matter what perfect childhood memories you may have of reflecting buttercups under your chin, they are the devil’s own flower!!!!!! Ranunculus repens, a pernicious spreading weed that reproduces by seed AND creeping runners. EVIL! Their roots went down further than the raspberry canes and it took me a full four hours to clear the patch. I’ve learned my lesson, I’ll be ripping their nasty little heads off when they first appear in future!

So coming home grumpy and aching, I only had the time and motivation to do these quick little scribbles of the kittehs mooching around the house. In my A6 Paperblanks Mediterranean Cats sketchbook with a Faber Castell Pitt pen, size S.

ps I haven’t chopped the cat’s head off in the top picture – she was bending over 😀

 

What’s In My Handbag?

At last, a break in the appalling weather, sunshine and a trip to Tenby! I’ve been to Tenby so often recently that I should buy a house there, I love the place. I went with some of my family, three generations of us, and we decamped to the beach for a picnic and a few hours play on the sand. It’s a great beach, lovely clean sea, golden sweeping sand, cliffs with nooks and crannies, caves and plenty of climbing opportunity. Loads of flora, but unfortunately the local fauna is mostly huge, aggressive, voracious seagulls. So big and nasty we kept the baby covered up – just in case! The little town was very busy hosting a bicycle race and the beach was full but not crowded – just nice.

I wandered off to supervise some of the great nephews and nieces who were scrambling over a small cliff face up to a cleft in the rock and saw a lad trying to climb down from the small cave. He was having some trouble, although not in any danger, so I whipped out my little A6 Winsor & Newton Medium Surface Cartridge Pad, a box of  Aquarelle pencils, a Faber Castell Pitt drawing pen [size S] and my reservoir brush from my handbag. If anyone’s wondering what a woman carries in her handbag – well that’s what’s in mine.

I only had a couple of minutes tops before he worked out how to get himself down so I scribbled quickly in pen, then added colour with Aquarelle and the reservoir brush – really strong colours from lichen [yellow/orange], Sea Thrift [purply pink], wild cabbage [greens] and what looked like small Michaelmas Daisies [purply pink also]. I like my reservoir brush, it sounds like something from a Tarantino gangster film 🙂

 

Colour, Vibration, Reality

I’ve been re-reading one of my favourite art books, Victoria Finlay’s ‘Colour: Travels Through The Paintbox‘. Most of my books on colour are dry and rather academic but this is a rare book – well researched, informative, intelligent AND beautifully written. She’s a social anthropologist turned journalist with a passion for art and that passion shines through in this book. There’s a bit in it about how what we see when we look at colour are actually vibrations, wavelengths of energy, electrons excited when light falls upon them. I’m absolutely fascinated by this and am trying to represent this in someway in my art. She also spent some time with Australian Aboriginal artists who explained that what we perceive as the real world actually lies ‘like a blanket’ over the reality of existence and this duality is what they are representing in their art.

I’ve been working on this piece for some time. I blogged the initial stages a couple of weeks ago and this week I’ve been overlaying the basic drawing and colour washes with a layer of white oil bar, thinned with a translucent colourless oil bar. Then I’ve removed some of the oil pigment with cotton buds [Q Tips] to create a vibrating mass of patterns across the surface of the figure. When you get up close, you can see through the surface pattern to the underlying ‘reality’. I feel like I’m getting somewhere with this.

 

 

 

 

Comfort Eating

I know the British summer is notoriously fickle but today takes the biscuit. It’s been so cold and wet that Husb and I went to the Continental Cafe for a full roast dinner at lunchtime, and lashings of hot tea, wrapped in layers of jumpers and raincoats. And now this evening there’s a storm going on outside with gale force winds and torrential rain. It’s the school holidays and summer festival season – Download and Hay-On-Wye have started and they’re getting washed out. Awful!

Anyway, here’s a couple of people also eating winter fodder in the Continental earlier. The chap, a policeman, had an interesting way of holding his fork in front of his face while he chewed . He had his summer uniform on. It’s a popular cafe, good, unpretentious food at very reasonable prices, very old school, always full. It’s been there a long time. You can’t beat it really, especially in the sort of climate when you might need comfort food at any time. Like we do.

The Fall of the House of Frolic

It’s been one of those typical British Summer days – cold and pouring down with rain, so husb and I have been following a typical British Bank Holiday tradition of Do-It-Yourself and we wallpapered the bedroom. I’ve spent nearly all evening filling out an online application for the Royal Society of Painter Printmakers first Open printmaking competition. These things always take much more time than I anticipate so I’ve done no arty stuff today at all. So I’m reposting a very funny spoof history of a little Welsh town from a series being written by a local writer. Hope you enjoy it and back to some art tomorrow.

The Fall of the House of Frolic.

ps if you’re a printmaker, there’s still time to submit work for the competition. Oh and there’s a transit of Venus happening soon – not that we’ll see anything here in the pouring rain lol