An Old Head….

A portrait drawing of an elderly man in profile looking to the right. He has curly hair and a muscled neck. The drawing is on cream and blue soft pastels onto a mid-brown paper and the style is very scribbly and textured.

I’ve been looking through old work, it’s surprising how much I’d forgotten about. Here’s one from 2010. I was enjoying working with chalk and soft pastels onto dark papers back then, on a large scale, this is size A2.

A Quick One.

I caught this quick sketch the other week at a birthday party, great place for a scribble because people are usually concentrating on chatting or listening to a band.

I drew with a Faber Castell Pitt drawing pen and a stick of Nitram charcoal into a small leather-bound sketchbook.

WTAF? Revisited.

The photo shows five antique wooden typeface blocks that spell out the acronym W T A F and a question mark. The letters are set back to front in a metal frame, a chase, and various pieces of metal furniture and a couple of groynes have been used to hold the letters firm ready for printing.
Setting The Type.

A couple of weeks ago I had a session on the Columbian Press at Swansea Print Workshop, using some antique and vintage wooden Letterpress. It didn’t work out too well, the letters were very dirty with a build up of ink and gunge over many years. I cleaned them up with vegetable oil and fine wire wool and had another go, rainbow rolling Cranfield Safewash Relief inks. Much better results – compare for yourself here.

Oil-based relief ink over a background of silkscreened acrylic.

The ink is much more even with fewer flaws. The letters are still quirky, the edges are a bit wobbly after many years of use, but the print quality is so much better now after a good clean. It’s a lesson learnt. Clean before printing as well as after.

A rich patina.

The cleaning process is gentle so while it removes the accumulated gunk of decades, it still leaves a lovely rich patina on the wood which is beautiful to look at in its own right.

More Big And Messy.

The photo shows two large paintings with one female figure on each. The figures are in action, playing tennis. They are very bright and colourful. The one on the left is more representational and is about to serve, holding her ball and racket high on a background of varied green shrubbery and a bright blue sky. The figure on the right is more abstracted and the figure flows across the paper against a background of peach, blue, green and orange swirls.
Fun With Full Size Figures.

Here are a couple more paintings done by participants at GS Artists in Swansea, as part of their excellent 9to90 Community Arts programme. We did BIG and MESSY acrylic paintings with tennis-themed life size figures. Paint was applied with sponges, bath scrunchies and occasionally even big paint brushes.

A detail showing overlays of acrylic colours.

Big And Messy!

A large painting of two people, one man with a Mohican haircut and a woman with a grey bob hairstyle. They wear brightly coloured tshirts, mostly reds and yellows and dark trousers. They are both raising their right arms with tennis rackets. They are standing in front of a background of green with blue sky above and the painting is splattered with bright colours.
Massive paintings at GS Artists.

I did some teaching this week, with a group of adults at GS Artists in Swansea as part of their excellent 9to90 Community Arts programme. We did BIG acrylic paintings with life size figures and a tennis theme for Summer. And it was MESSY! Loved it! I started out by getting people to draw around each others bodies to get outlines in place and then we went at it with runny colours, sponges, bath scrunchies and even the occasional paintbrush which we used for splattering!

Flowery Frocks.

A drawing in pen and charcoal of two women in flowery frocks. One is drawn in profile, she has long dark hair and she is looking to the left and holding a balloon aloft in her left hand. The other is a half figure, up to the edge of the page, shown from behind. She has shoulder-length blonde hair.
Frocks in the wild.

Husb and I went to a birthday party at the weekend and there were lots of flowery frocks in the room. I never wear frocks and I’m not used to seeing so many of them in one place, so of course, I had to scribble them in my tiny sketchbook with a Faber Castell Pitt drawing pen and Nitram charcoal stick.

One From Behind ….

A drawing in pen and charcoal of the back of a stocky man, possibly a rugby player. He is bald on top with still some hair around the sides and back He has large ears that stick out. He's wearing a dark rugby shirt and his back and shoulders dominate the drawing.
The paper is very textured.

I was out at a ‘do’ the other evening and I did a few scribbles. There was this very stocky bloke sitting nearby. The ‘do’ was in a Rugby Club and I’m guessing from his build that he was a player.

I used Faber Castell Pitt drawing pens, sizes S and M, and Nitram charcoal stick into my tiny leatherbound sketchbook.

The Last Of The Annual Cockling.

Working on the labyrinth.

Here’s the final tiny quick sketches I did in my little leather-bound sketchbook on Sunday. I was at Rosehill Quarry’s annual meet-up to tidy the Cretan Labyrinth. Each year the edges need to be recut, the old trampled cockle shells removed and new ones laid.

The labyrinth was cut in 1987 when Swansea’s Rosehill Quarry was being developed into a unique urban wildlife park. It was installed by Bob Shaw and local author and pre-historian Dewi Bowen. 

More From The Annual Cockling.

A couple of very quick little sketches from the annual labyrinth maintenance at Rosehill Quarry. I had to work quickly because people moved fast. Very good practice though

The Annual Cockling.

A very long thin watercolour and ink sketch showing a man in the foreground next to a pile of cockle shells looking down on a part of a labyrinth where two figures are bent over working. In the background are layers of foliage in different greens going right up into the blue/grey overcast sky.
Rosehill Quarry Labyrinth.

Back in 1987 a Labyrinth was cut into the turf in Swansea’s Rosehill Quarry, a unique urban wildlife park. It was installed by Bob Shaw and local author and pre-historian Dewi Bowen. It’s based on an ancient Cretan design and the incised path is filled with crushed cockle shells that are a by-product of the local seafood industry. Every year local people meet up, bring a picnic to share and recut the labyrinth edges and refill the path with new cockle shells, donated by Swansea Council.

I strolled up the hill today and found a good point to have a scribble. I did a few quick preliminary sketches into a tiny sketchbook and then worked up this larger one into my Khadi landscape book, using Faber Castell Pitt drawing pens sizes S and M, and Derwent Inktense watercolour blocks.