Another little sketch from the rock gig at Elysium in Swansea last Friday. I was listening to King Goon and scribbling as well, using a Faber Castell Pitt pen and Nitram charcoal. These sketches take one minute, two tops, sometimes just seconds. Speed sketching focuses you on the essentials of what’s before you, no time to be distracted by details.
And another little scribble from last Friday’s gig at Elysium in Swansea. I was listening to King Goon and having a scribble at the same time, using a Faber Castell Pitt pen and Nitram charcoal. Although it’s been grey and rainy, it’s still very warm so lots of guys still in shorts, which I find really interesting to draw.
Another quick scribble of audience members at the recent gig at Elysium. It’s a cracking venue, loads of different music genres, plus poetry, comedy, life drawing, crafts, creative writing, a Welsh Learners’ cafe and art group, and, of course, the exhibitions over three galleries. Something for everyone.
I spend a couple of happy hours at Elysium in Swansea today, in an art class for Welsh learners. I speak and read Welsh a bit (yn tipyn bach) but struggle to go beyond conversational Welsh and into specialist topics. This session today looked at one of the current exhibitions, by Arwel Micah, very atmospheric semi-abstract landscapes in oils. We did some sketching from some of the artworks and then did a little acrylic painting inspired by the originals, bilingually. I loved it!
The next one is on September 30th if you fancy it and there will be two more after that before the end of the year, linked to an exhibition in one of the 3 galleries. And they’re FREE / AM DDIM!
I work part-time for a national charity as an art tutor with adult learners and yesterday I took a small group out and about to make graphite rubbings of “street metal” – manholes and stop cock covers. We used Koh-I-Noor graphite blocks (6B) onto Japanese HoSho paper.
When I got back, I photocopied some of the rubbings – the copier changed the colour from black/grey to shades of greyish blue and degraded the quality of the image a bit. I cut up some of these degraded images and played around with them on dark blue card.
Here is a short film Husb has made of scribbles from one of my sketchbooks, out and about catching everyday life. The soundtrack is fab 😀
I was at Swansea Print Workshop this afternoon and I started working on a small circular Gelli-plate, laying down the first colour, which is Process Yellow, an intense lemon. I’m using Caligo Safe Wash Relief ink mixed 50:50 with Extender to increase translucency and the texture is created with a net that lemons were sold in. There are a couple more layers in different colours to come.
I’ve hit a creative block! It happens. I’ve found that a useful way to deal with it is to do some technical exercises in my sketchbooks until I’m unblocked. I was having a bit of a reminisce and remembered going to see Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party in London way back when. I can’t remember where it was, I remember it was a warehouse-type building and very dark inside. I think it was the early 80s. I was blown away by it! It was the first installation I had ever seen. Although I was skint, I bought the book and I still have it, all dog eared and yellowing.
I started flicking through it today and decided to start copying some of the plates using drawing pens (Faber Castell Pitt) and watercolours (Derwent Inktense blocks). The first is Hatshepsut, the great Egyptian Queen (1503-1482 BC). I’m not happy with the little sketch, but that’s ok, I will improve as I do more. I wonder how many I’ll do before the blockage shifts? Doesn’t matter, I’m enjoying revisiting the Dinner Party and reading about all those amazing women.
Here’s one from the archives for #StandingStoneSunday. I can’t remember when I did this, probably around 10 years ago. I marbled some paper in my studio, in tones of grey and took some of it with me when Husb and I visited the spectacular Pentre Ifan monument in Pembrokeshire. I drew onto it with blocks of graphite and solid carbon, which gave me two very different blacks. The graphite is a shiny, silvery black and the carbon a dense, matt black.
scribblah 