More from the gig on Samhain at Elysium. The headline band, Adfeilion played a very atmospheric set. I scribbled away in my sketchbook but to be honest, I got right drawn into the music and ended up headbanging…hurt like heck the next day! Samhain is also known as Halloween and in Welsh, it’s Nos Calan Gaeaf.
Husb and I went to a fab gig on Halloween / Samhain at Elysium. The line up was great, Root Zero, Grindhorse 83, Pyrogaric and Adfeilion headlining. There were a lot of women, both performing and in the audience. I had a scribble of course. Makes a change sketching women’s legs at a heavy gig, it’s usually full of men in short trousers and big boots.
Last week I did a series of portrait drawings at Swansea Print Workshop’s Life Drawing Group. I chose the best likeness, the last drawing as it happened, and I transferred it to a block of traditional grey lino and then started carving. The drawings took 2.5 hours, the transfer about 15 minutes and so far I’ve spent an hour and a quarter on the carving. I reckon I have another 15-30 minutes on cutting and then I’ll be ready to take a proof print.
It seems I was doing a lot of digital drawings of SpartaPuss back in December 2014. She’s a five year old here. I’ve drawn her with a free Markers app onto my Samsung Galaxy Note 8 tablet. I liked that app very much but there came a point where I lost interest in digital drawing and went back to “real life” sketching and put the tablet away. Husb found it the other week when he was decluttering. He fired it up and it still works, so I might give it another go.
I was sitting quietly, sipping coffee and watching others sitting quietly, sipping coffee and reading and writing, in Waterstones Café in Swansea. Ideal conditions for sketching people. So I did. Ballpoint pen into an A6 sketchbook.
I had a nice cuppa coffee in Waterstones Café this afternoon and scribbled some of the other patrons as I sipped. I used to go regularly to the café before Covid, but the lockdown got me out of the habit, which is a pity because it’s a good place to sketch as people are usually absorbed in a book and don’t notice me. I’m going to try and get back into the habit weekly now, the coffee is good, a reasonable price and I can get some decent sketching done. They also have a loyalty card, so every 10th cuppa is free.
Here’s a selection of scribbles from my sketchbooks in September 2014, I was busy out and about sketching that month. I must find more time to draw in public again.
Here are the final three sketches I did last week at life drawing group at Swansea Print Workshop. I’m going to be focusing on portrait drawing for the foreseeable future and I want to improve my technique to get an accurate likeness as quickly as I can. But for me, it still takes a while, slogging through fast poses and then slowing down, to analyse the face thoroughly and get something credible. The final pose, bottom left is the one that looks most like the model and I got it in the last 20 minutes of a two and a half hour drawing session. It was very focused, very intense. I used a W.H. Smith HB pencil onto Bristol Board with Faber Castell Pitt 6B Graphite to fill the background.
You can see the progression from the start to the end of the session below. It took a lot of analysis and repeating the drawing to get it right.
I carried on with this little cat piece, using Derwent Aquatone watercolour sticks onto a heavy watercolour paper with Escoda Versátil brushes. The cat shapes are from a stencil I cut of our little Bill the rescue cat some time ago. This is the first thing I’ve done with the Aquatone sticks and I’m getting used to what they can do, especially with blending. Once they’re dry, the colour doesn’t dissolve when you put water on, unlike normal watercolour paints. I’m thinking I might draw some detailing on top with Faber Castell Pitt drawing pens. Experimenting like this is part and parcel of an arts practice, you never stop learning.
Here are the next 3 sketches from the life drawing session last night. I’m going to be focusing on portrait drawing for the foreseeable future and we had a long pose yesterday so I was able to get in a lot of practice. These are more accurate than the first three I did and I was also able to have a bit of a play with the drawing style. I had fun breaking up the head into swirls and angles, and it helped me to analyse what was in front of me. I think it’s a better way of understanding what’s there than trying to be very accurate and detailed from the start. There are 2 x 10 minute drawings and one of twenty minutes.
scribblah 