Xmas Day At The High Dependency Unit

Ink sketch: Xmas at the H.D.U.

An elderly relative went into hospital for heart surgery a few days ago and after a night in Intensive Care, he was transferred to the High Dependency Unit for intensive nursing. He’s doing well and will hopefully be transferred to a general ward in a couple of days but we’ve been back and fro visiting him for the past five days and it’s a strange and unsettling place to be. Most of the patients are very frail and elderly and the Unit is very high-tech with patients hooked up to many machines and lots of tubes coming in and out of their bodies. Of course, these machines and the very high level of nursing care are saving lives and giving people a chance of a few more years of quality life, but the machines are quite scary and the atmosphere is necessarily not relaxed and homely like the general wards. At this time of year there are no Xmas cards or decorations, no personal items at bedsides, just the bare minimum of individual possessions in amongst all the medical paraphanalia. It reminds me a bit of The Matrix.

But visiting hours bring smiles to the faces of the patients and also the staff, who seem genuinely pleased to see their patients spirits lift when they get visitors. Everyone who went into the Unit at the same time as my relative seems to be getting stronger each day so there’s a lot to be grateful for. I know there are problems with the National Health Service and we shouldn’t be afraid to speak out and challenge poor care and bad attitudes, but when it’s working well it’s a fantastic thing that so many people in other parts of the world don’t have access to.Today it was especially poignant to remember that there are people unable to spend this holiday with their families, and that there are staff who are working through the festive season to keep others alive and well.

The drawing is done in Faber Castell Pitt drawing pen, size S into an A6 leather-bound recycled ‘Artbox’ sketchbook. I have changed the facial features to maintain anonymity. I wanted to capture the tininess of the human in amongst all the machinery and tubing.

Wherever I Lay My Hat

Ink and graphite sketch: From a London hotel room.

 

I try to sketch every day – don’t always succeed unfortunately but carrying a sketchbook and a packet of drawing pens in my bag helps to motivate me. I think it’s important to just get on with it and not worry too much about what it is you’re drawing. It may not be the most interesting subject in the History of Art but it will certainly have some meaning for you when you look back through your sketchbook.

Husb and I take advantage of cheap hotel and train offers to pop up to London to trawl round the galleries and museums. We’re lucky to have these world-class institutions just a few hours away and although there are charges for special temporary exhibitions, the permanent collections are free. I don’t usually have time to draw when I’m at the galleries but there’s really no excuse when you’ve flopped down on the bed back at the hotel. Here’s the view from a rather nice budget hotel in Canary Wharf at the end of a long summer day trawling around public collections. I was slobbing on the bed and this is what I could see in the twilight, but if you pressed your nose to the window you could see the Millenium Dome.

It’s drawn in Faber Castell Pitt drawing pens and graphite block into an A6 Daler Rowney hardbound sketchbook.

A Load Of Mangy Scribblings.

Ink sketch: small boy with dangling legs.

When I was in Art College, back in the days of the dinosaurs 😉 we were told to keep a sketchbook and to put something in it everyday. What fascinated me at the time was the diversity of sketchbook styles and approaches amongst my fellow students. Some put as much effort into their sketchbook as they did in final pieces of work and produced these sumptuous, wondrous, beautifully bound confections teeming with exquisitely rendered drawings and paintings, illustrations and collages. True to form, my sketchbooks tend to be a load of scruffy, mangy rag-tag collections of thoughts and scribblings, sometimes almost as many written as drawn lines. I suppose they’re a drawn diary of what’s caught my attention at the time, so when I look through them, it triggers memories and takes me back to the time and place of the original drawing. They can sometimes be very emotional so I’m a bit careful about letting people look through them.

Sometimes we get some quite nice weather in the British summer. Sometimes, not often. On these infrequent occasions, husb and I like to stroll along the beach just a few minutes walk from our home and around the local marina. There’s a nice cafe / ice cream parlour there with little tables outside, overlooking the boats and this fine day there was a little boy sitting with his Grandpa at the table in front of us, his little legs dangling in mid-air as he tucked into his ice-cream and pop, because he was too small to reach the floor. It wasn’t easy to draw his tiny skinny legs through the legs of the chair. The rest of the page is filled with notes about a completely different drawing which is in another part of the sketchbook entirely.

A Recumbent Man And A Lovely Bit Of Engineering

Full colour reduction monotype.

I love working on a larger scale with a three-colour reduction monotype technique. I generally start with a drawing from life: I’m lucky that Swansea has a thriving life drawing group with a rota of professional models of all ages and shapes. Occasionally I use a drawing that I digitally alter on Adobe Photoshop, but I think that you can tell when something’s had the Photoshop treatment so I rarely use it. This is one of our baby-boomer models. I like drawing this age group – interesting to see the effects of life’s progression, but also they tend to have had interesting life experiences to talk about. I also like drawing reclining poses but this sparks some dissent in the life drawing group as quite a lot of artist’s don’t like them. We generally compromise and get one recliner per session and if I’m very lucky I might get into a position of  extreme foreshortening. Yeah I know, I’m an artistic masochist lol.

This piece is around A1 in size and is on BFK Rives 250gsm paper using oil-based litho/relief inks in Process Yellow, Red and Blue. It was printed on a Victorian Radcliffe Intaglio press. Lovely piece of engineering, built to last.

A Ghost In Charcoal.

Charcoal reduction drawing.

Just came back from another Xmas curry. What is it about Xmas and curry houses? I’m going to be barrel-shaped at the end of the holidays at this rate 🙂

I’ve been clearing out my studio because I’m moving to a new, bigger studio over the road and I’m finding loads of work I’d forgotten about lurking at the bottom of my plans chest. This one is a large, A0, charcoal reduction drawing. I started by covering the paper with a layer of compressed charcoal [I had the paper on top of a slightly textured board]. Working directly from life, I’drew’ the highlights by removing the charcoal with a putty rubber [Blu Tack works just as well] The end result is ghostly and ethereal. It helps me technically to focus on the high- and low-lights which is quite a good exercise to do.

The Big Apple Crumbled!

Ink drawing: The big apple.

Some people think that The Big Apple is a nickname for New York City but we in Swansea know that it’s the name of a tiny little green concrete kiosk on the cliff above the sea in the Welsh fishing village of Mumbles. It was one of a hundred or so specially built in the 1930’s across Britain to promote an apple drink and no-one actually knows how it was built but it may have been created by pouring concrete and steel into a mould, similar to a military pillbox.  Over the years the others have been demolished and the Mumbles Big Apple is the only one left, possibly in the world. A couple of years ago a drunk driver crashed into it and destroyed the bottom half – he made the Big Apple crumble!!!!!

There was an outcry and a Facebook page to save it quickly attracted tens of thousands of people, telling their memories and stories of the Big Apple through the generations, including when some students painted it orange to look like a pumpkin one Halloween! And a young man who proposed to his finace there, because he couldn’t afford to take her to New York.  Luckily, the owners managed to get the cash together to rebuild it – they appreciated how much of a landmark it is for the area and now it’s been restored to its former glory.

Husb and I rushed down there when we heard the news, he took photos and I made this little drawing in Faber Castell Pitt ink pens into an A6 Cotman watercolour pad. Here’s a link to what it looks like now it’s restored.

http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/uk-news/2010/05/05/mumbles-big-apple-back-in-business-91466-26377598/

 

 

 

 

Sheep Staring At Me!

Continuous line drawing: Elan Valley Sheep.

 

Someone asked me today what ‘continuous line drawing’ is. I use the technique a lot. What you do is draw with a good quality pen or pencil, one that gives a nice flowing line, and you try not to:

a) lift your pen off the surface of the paper and

b) look at your drawing too often.

The idea is to keep looking at the subject and ‘feel’ your way quickly around the paper with the point of your pen. You look at the drawing occasionally to stop yourself from going completely off, but resist the temptation to keep checking it and trust yourself!

If you keep your pen on the paper, you’ll achieve a flowing line and you’ll often have to go back over bits to get to other parts of the drawing, but that’s all right because you’ll end up with very lively, vibrant lines. You can have a few breaks but try to keep these to a minimum.

This method gives lots of life to your drawings and also helps with accuracy as you’re constantly observing the subject and you’re also drawing the surroundings as well as the subject. I hope that explains it. Feel free to question me if you want 🙂

More Left Handed Shenanigans

Drawings with my left hand.

I’m busy clearing out my studio at the moment to move to a new, bigger studio across the road and I’m using the opportunity to sort through and catalogue my work and also to be ruthless and bin stuff that doesn’t come up to scratch. I found this study and it’s more of the left handed drawings I spoke about recently. It’s a useful exercise to draw with your ‘other’ hand because it engages parts of the brain you don’t normally associate with drawing. These three heads were 5 minute poses drawn onto an A1 sheet of sugar paper with soft chalky pastels. In some ways I find it easier to draw with the other hand because I seem to be more analytical and the measurements and likenesses are easier to do. But the line is definitely more wobbly and harder to control, although sometimes it works very well like that. This is another elder model who has a brilliantly craggy and expressive face – great to draw.

 

Curry, Conversation And A Missed Blog!

Ink drawing over a transfer print.

 

Didn’t do my daily drawing blog yesterday!!!!! I went out for the annual Life Drawing Group curry, to the rather excellent Vojon Restaurant in Swansea and by the time I got home it was way too late to blog. I thought I would have had enough time as we met at the curry house at 7.30 but we all had such a good time that we didn’t get home ‘til after midnight. It’s always hard to choose because it’s such an excellent menu but they have a garlic-lovers selection and I was in the right mood for a garlic overdose, so I had the Garlic Lamb Frezi with garlic rice. The garlic rice was so garlicky that it’s probably best described as a spot of rice in a bowl of garlic. Delicious. Luckily husb also had the garlic rice, so we were able to sleep in the same bedroom.

There were seventeen of us, fourteen artists of all ages and three of our fabulous models. One of them is in this drawing. He’s one of our baby boomer models and he’s a joy to draw. I’ve used as my base a piece of Bockingford 250 gsm. I did a transfer print onto it some time ago, using a photograph [of an ancient mountainous village in Northern Pakistan] which I printed out with an ordinary inkjet printer. I placed the image face down on the Bockingford and quickly brushed the back of it with acetone [nail varnish remover], slapped a bit of tissue paper on top and speedily trundled it through one of the etching presses. This transferred the image onto the Bockingford, but in the process the image can change quite a lot, especially the colours. After all that palaver, I decided I didn’t like it so I drew on top of it in Faber Castell Pitt pens. Then I liked it 🙂

 

In The Life Drawing Studio [2]

Ink sketch: model and artist.

One of the things I love about being an artist is that it’s a life-long pursuit. I know little tiny budding artists only a few years old and I work with veteran artists in their seventies and eighties and all ages in between. I remember Bill Turnbull interviewing Howard Hodgkinson on BBC Breakfast a couple of years ago and he asked when Howard was going to retire. HH put him straight. It isn’t a job. It isn’t something you retire from. It is a state of being, not a state of employment.

Our life drawing group has a wide cross-section of artists, from school students in their teens who are amassing life drawing for their A level Art portfolios to artists in their eighth or ninth decade with a lifetime of experience – of art and life – behind them, still exploring, still innovating, still doing…… There are roughly equal numbers of male and female artists involved in the drawing group, although the membership of the printmaking studio itself probably has more women.

This is a detail from a drawing done in Faber Castell Pitt drawing pens into an A3 Cotman watercolour sketchbook. I went through a phase of using textured watercolour paper for sketching, mainly because I’d found a very cheap source of them for a while.