Snatched Sketch And Exercises In Anatomy

Sketch in biro.

We went into the new studio over the weekend and completely re-arranged the space because I wasn’t comfortable working in it last week. Today was so much better. I finally settled back into some drawing after the Xmas break and the studio move. Husb came over at lunchtime and brought some meatball and melted cheese sandwiches, home made in the lovely little café opposite with their own chilli sauce – HOT! He had a catnap in the chair and so I grabbed my sketchbook – never miss an opportunity. Great chance to get a rare up-the-nose angle. The sketch is in biro, which I’m really getting into at the moment, into my recycled, leather-bound A6 Artbox sketchbook.

Chalk and charcoal drawing: dark man.

I spent the rest of my time there working through some exercises from Sarah Simlett’s book, ‘Anatomy for the Artist’. I’m planning to do a small series of editioned block prints, probably lino, over the next few weeks – bit tired of monotypes at the moment- and I needed some inspiration. I find it often comes if I do some technical studies and after a couple of pages of hand studies, I started drawing one of the figures into my black A5 Paperchase, spiral-bound sketchbook. I restricted myself to white chalk and black compressed charcoal, which gives a different black to the background paper and I minimised the detail, emphasising the outline. I think I’m heading in the right direction; it needs to be a pared-down design for a block print.

 

 

Tattoo Tattoo Tattoo

Ink drawing: Tattooed lady.

One of my favourite models at the life drawing group in the print workshop is a retired biology teacher who has had her body covered in tattoos representing the food chain. Lizards scramble across her body chasing ants and flies into carnivorous plants. She’s not easy to draw because it’s a balance between drawing her tattoos or the detail of her face and body.

I’ve posted her today because I’ve been listening to Van Halen’s single, Tattoo, on Planet Rock radio all week. I like having rock on in the background when I’m working in the studio and I’m chuffed that they’ve reformed with their original singer, David Lee Roth. Here’s a link to the single Tattoo – I can’t wait for the album. Of course, Van Halen geeks will know that the original bassist, Michael Anthony, has formed supergroup Chickenfoot with their second singer Sammy Hagar – also an excellent band – and that Michael’s place has been taken by Eddie Van Halen’s son, Wolfgang.

Anyway, enough of rock – this is supposed to be an arty blog. This is one of a series of drawings I did on one page of an A3 spiral bound Cotman watercolour pad in Faber Castell Pitt drawing pens with just a bit of graphite block in there as well.

I’m hoping that Van Halen will be doing a British tour this year – I will KILL for tickets 🙂

 

 

A Page Of Pigeons

Ink sketch: local pigeons.

 

There’s a nice cafe in an old cinema that’s been converted to a Waterstones bookshop in the cuty centre. Sometimes I sit in the large Victorian bow window, drinking tea and wathcing what’s going on outside and sketching. When I first started, there was a Woolworth’s store opposite which had large signage that stuck out a few inches from the wall. While it was doing well, the signage was lit up – a bright orange – but when the chain went bankrupt, the store was empty for a couple of years and because the signage was no longer lit up, it was no longer too hot for the pigeons, who colonised it almost immediately. They were almost directly opposite me so I began to draw them during my visits.

I don’t usually draw animals and had never attempted birds before and they were really hard to draw, they don’t sit still, always fidgeting. It was quite a challenge artistically so I ended up concentrating on capturing the ‘spirit’ of the birds instead of trying and failing to get a detailed likeness. That’s what taxidermy is for. I prefer to draw animals alive. The ‘H’ shows one of the letters with it’s cover off, probably blown away in a storm, and all the electrical gubbins inside. The shop has now been taken over by The Pound Store and their signage is flat, so the pigeons have nowhere to stay and I can no longer sit and sip tea and draw them.

Drawin in Faber Castell Pitt drawing pens, various sizes, into a Daler Rowney bound A5 sketchbook.

One Head, Three Drawings.

Three drawings.

I often do technical exercises for practice and during one life drawing session I tried out three techniques during the same pose. The drawing on the left was done in Faber Castell Pitt brushpen using my left hand [I’m righthanded]; the middle one in FCP pen size Small using my normal hand and the drawing on the right was done with compressed charcoal, again with my normal hand. I naturally favour the central one because I prefer to draw in pen, but the charcoal drawing is very lively and I think it’s more expressive. The one done with my left hand is probably the most analytical, even though it’s the least satisfactory to me.

Beefy Cobbler And Cat Sick Pie

Ink sketches.

 

Been babysitting a seven year old relative who has very definite ideas on what he will and won’t eat. I’m old school – he’ll eat a balanced meal and that’s that. I bought some very cheap braising steak and cooked it very slowly in a low oven with loads of onions and some good beef stock until it was delicious, soft and tender, mixed it with peas and grated carrot and put it into the oven with a cheesy scone topping, a traditional dish called a ‘cobbler’ in Britain. He looked at it just before I put the topping on.

“Yuk. That looks like cat sick. I’m not going to eat cat sick!”

“Yeah, of course, I cook cat sick all the time for small children!’

“Well I’m not going to eat it!”

“Wanna bet?”

I served it up at teatime. He wolfed it down and told me it was delicious. He said he wouldn’t mind having cat sick pie again.

Drawing children is hard – they have alien features. They’re all squished and their faces and heads are abnormal. Adults are so much easier. I generally don’t like to work from photographs because to my mind the work doesn’t have much life to it, so it’s good to find a way of keeping sprogs still enough to draw them. Apparently it’s frowned upon to tie them to a chair but it’s OK to stick them in front of a computer or DVD / TV. Here’s the sprog absorbed in a computer game. It’s not quite an accurate portrait of him but not bad for a first attempt; even with the computer on, he still wriggled an awful lot. I used an HB pencil and 9B graphite block into my A6 recycled paper and leather Artbox sketchbook. The drawing on the left I did a few nights ago, standing over my husb as he was reading. It’s a very odd angle and I found it very difficult to draw.

 

Higgledy Piggledy Hillside.

It’s unusual for me to draw anything other than people and the odd animal but there’s an interesting jumbled cityscape scrambling up the hill opposite the window in my new studio. I’ve injured my foot and my chiropodist asked me to keep off it as much as possible for a few weeks. A few weeks!!!!!! It’s terrible. You only realise how physical art is when some of your body is out of action. Keeping off my feet means not doing any printmaking, not working at the easel, not doing anything large at all. I’m using the time to catch up with admin [tax returns yuk!], reading and research [I have a year’s worth of back copies of a-n magazine to get through] and some chair-based sketching. So to push my artistic boundaries I thought I’d start drawing the cityscape opposite.

Not easy! I have to be disciplined enough to get proportions and perspective right but ‘artsy’ enough so it doesn’t look like an architectural drawing. I’m using a Tate Landscape sketchbook which is 58 x 15 cms fully opened so I can do a panoramic view and I might eventually do several, one above the other, stacking them so I get all the hillside in. At this stage I’m concentrating on accuracy, because I’m new to the subject matter, but maybe there’s scope for redrawing onto Mark Resist [Mylar] film in a much freer style to form the basis for some screenprinting? Hmmmmmmm…….

I’m using a variety of Derwent pencils, from HB and through a range of B grades. I rarely use pencil – don’t like ‘em, but as I’m pushing my boundaries by not drawing the human body, I might as well go the whole hog and try and get used to graphite at the same time. I much prefer the cleaner lines of drawing pens, but there are some nice qualities to the graphite that I haven’t really explored before. Here’s the first stage of the drawing – some of it is still very pale and so far I’ve only used the right hand page of the sketchbook. The left hand side will take in the local brothel. Interesting area!

 

Big Bottomed Cat In A Kitty Sketchbook

My new sketchbook.

I had some new sketchbooks for Xmas. I love getting sketchbooks for presents. This is a lovely little one, about size A6, sewn binding, acid-free sustainable paper and a lovely cover that flips over itself and closes magnetically, by Paperblanks. Chuffed with it. It’s fitting that the very first sketch should be of a cat. Sparta, our tortoiseshell [calico] cat, was just cwtched next to me on the settee and because of the angle she was foreshortened quite a bit, which made her bum look rather big. Mind you, she’s been getting a bit chubby lately anyway. We’re quite strict with our cats and only give them regulation rations, but they have a knack of hunting down pensioners and persuading them to spend their pittance on tidbits. We think this is what’s happening, because when she comes in for her tea, she’s often licking her lips and then turns her nose up at what’s on offer. So maybe her bum isn’t so foreshortened after all. I’ll have to ask Dr. Rayya for her advice lol. I didn’t want to disturb Sparta so I grabbed a biro and used that to sketch with.

Biro sketch: Sparta's big bum.

Male Nude, Female Artist.

Life drawing.

Here’s one of our younger models in a pose reflected in the large mirrors in the drawing studio at Swansea Print Workshop. I like to put the model in the context of the space and show what’s going on around. What I particularly like about this one is that the model is a man and the artist reflected in the mirror is a woman, which reverses a lot of people’s expectations. Life drawing can be quite controversial outside Western Europe – and even within it. I think part of that may be down to the history of art modelling and art, when most [almost all] artists were men and most models were women, considered just a little step above prostitution. Now it’s a credible career choice and we have models from all sorts of backgrounds, none of them exploitative and of course, women are now allowed to be artists. The drawing is in Faber Castell Pitt pens into an A3 sketchbook, drawn across both pages.

Speedy Sketches With Seconds To Spare.

Ink sketch on the New York subway.

I carry a little sketchbook with me at all times [even in the bath lol] and it’s good discipline to take it out and sketch whatever is in front of you, at random. It means that you can’t be too precious about what you’re drawing and also you have to capture the essence of the drawing very quickly because you don’t know when it’s going to change. I’ve visited New York City a few times and it’s a great place to draw, although I avoid the temptation to draw famous landmarks because it’s been done so many times before. I did this little sketch of the two lads on the New York subway very quickly. They were teenagers and full of energy so they kept moving about and I had to ‘get’ them in just a few lines. Faber Castell Pitt pen into an A6 spiral-bound Cotman watercolour sketchpad. I went through a phase of drawing into watercolour pads: I’d like to say it was for artistic reasons but to be honest, they were selling them very cheaply at the time in a local discount store.

 

Ink sketch in East Harlem.

 

Another time, I was visiting the New York International Print Fair with another artist and we were staying in a little hostel in East Harlem – very interesting place with lovely South American food. She was waiting for a take-away meal and I wandered outside. It was about 7pm and this elderly lady was taking her elderly dog for a walk along the street. Both of them were wearing knitted jumpers to keep out the October chill. I quickly drew them at different stages of their stroll, again in Faber Castell Pitt drawing pen but this time into a rather nice A6 ‘postcard’ sketchbook that I bought at the Tate Modern gallery shop before I went to the USA. I filled it with drawings as a present for my husband instead of sending him commercial postcards.

The Vulnerable Artist And The Great Big Draw

At the great big draw.

A few months ago, some of the artists involved in Artawe got together and did a big draw at Elysium Gallery, taking over the space for a week to, well, just to draw. A few of us stapled huge sheets of brown wrapping paper to the walls and the word went out to local artists to come in and draw all over them with charcoal and chalk. Just like we were told NOT to do by our Mams when we were little. We started on a Saturday and continued throughout the following week until the gallery was full. It was open to the public and we were in fullview through the large windows. It was photographed and a short film made of it and then it was ripped down and binned. Ephemeral art indeed. Here’s a photo of the whole thing by Chris Harrendence who drew the amazing top-hatted man on the far left.

At the big draw. Photo by Chris Harrendence.

It was about the time that Ai Wei Wei had ‘disappeared’ in China and my drawing refelcted on the artist’s role and how vulnerable we are if our art challenges political, social or religious norms. I’m looking at my drawing top right, above a work by Sandra Demar and Tim Kelly’s work just behind me. It was brilliant that so many artists turned up just to enjoy the act of drawing together, done on a shoestring, no public funding, advertised by word of mouth and social networking. It was also good that so many members of the public were able to see artists at work. We’re usually closeted away in our studios, houses, garden sheds and garrets.