Here’s the second piece I made on my training course with the most excellent glass artist Lisa Burkl the other day.
Step 1: Paint a design onto the outside of a clean glass bowl with acrylic pens and paints. Leave it to dry.
Step 2: Cover the painted area thinly with glue (it’s a special one for gilding). Leave it to get tacky.
Step 3: Gently smooth a sheet of gilt over the glued area with a soft brush.
Step 4: Turn it over and go “OOOOOOOHHHHH” 😀
It’s #Caturday Saturday and here are some very quick sketches I did a while back of a cat mostly moving, which is rare! I drew speedily to try and capture the cats in action rather than details.
I learnt a new technique today, from inspirational glass artist, Lisa Burkl. It’s gilding onto glass and then drawing into it. I’d never realised this method would suit drawing so much. I’ve been doing a lot of artwork recently about the inspirational South Wales Miner’s Wives of 1984-1985, so I continued that topic here. I had to come up with a design quickly today, so I looked online at the inspirational work of Paul Peter Pieche. The design is maybe a little too close to Pieche’s work, but I can live with that as it’s just a practice piece.
I did these lino prints a few years back. I was playing with some vinyl, a cheap alternative to lino, cutting random shapes and then printing and overprinting in Process Yellow, Magenta and Cyan to see what happened. I didn’t much like them at the time but now I’ve been looking through my archives, I think they’re OK. I honestly don’t know why I objected to them so much.
We’ve had a couple of fine Spring days so I jumped at the chance to get into the garden and do some tidying up. It’s joyous being there. It’s only a little city-centre patch but Husb and I have crammed as much as we can into it. My seasonal favourites are the Hellebores, Primulas and Rhubarb which are giving some wonderful flashes of colour – pinks, purples, yellows and reds. We’ve already enjoyed a couple of rhubarb crumbles. There’s a little wild strawberry plant sneaking alongside the rhubarb, they get everywhere!
We created a little wildlife pond and the lovely Zantedeschia Aethiopica that lives happily in it provides large architectural leaves throughout the year and spectacular flowers in Summer.
I’ve been looking at Google maps recently, exploring the city online and finding interesting nooks and crannies. I knew about this Bronze Age stone in Bon-y-maen, to the North East of the city, and I have even visited and drawn it, but I never really gave much thought to the area around it.
The name means “The Base Of The Stone” and legend says that it is joined up with the Penmaen stone many miles away on the Gower Peninsula (Penmaen means “The Head Of The Stone”). It might have been erected on this site as much as 4,000 years ago and no-one knows if there were dwellings there at the time, although it’s long been suspected that there may be prehistoric burials. It’s up on a hill overlooking the River Tawe valley and Swansea Bay, a good vantage point.
Settlements eventually grew up around it and the nearest houses look to be small 19th century terraced buildings, possibly built to house workers during the rapid development of the Industrial Revolution. The pollution was so bad back then that the farmers in the area had to give up as the land became poisoned from copper, lead and silver smelting. The area was also badly bombed during the Swansea Blitz in World War 2 and bomb craters, now green with vegetation, can be seen on satellite maps.
Faber Castell Pitt drawing pen onto vintage paper.
I’ve been rummaging through some old sketchbooks and found these drawings from the Fringe Arts Bath (FAB) Festival in 2016, a few years before Covid19. It seems like another world. A small group of us stood in crowded streets in the sunshine and sketched, no knowledge of the impending pandemic that totally changed the way we interact in public. It was joyous.
I love growing it. Not so keen on eating it, I like the taste but it really doesn’t like me. It is a laxative. I love cooking with rhubarb though and my garden plants are so prolific that I’ve tried out many recipes. Here’s a drawing I did some years ago and here’s a photo taken today, in my garden.
A quickly scribbled head with graphite into a Khadi sketchbook.
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