Back to October 2014 for this #Caturday Archive. I was still having fun with digital drawing, using a free Markers app on my Samsung Tablet Note 8. SpartaPuss the Naughty Tortie was about 5 years old here. She had her back to me but was interested in what I was doing, you can tell by her ears.
After the mess I made of my last pair of legs (a drawing, not actually my gams), I sketched out the next pair in pencil, instead of going straight in with a ballpoint pen. I’ll sleep on it and when I’m happy with the pencilling, I’ll work it up in ink. These legs are part of practice I’m doing to develop some ideas I have for lino prints.
May 2014 and I was well into my digital drawing phase. I had a Samsung Galaxy Note 8 with a free “Markers” app and I really took to it. “Markers” is the only drawing app that I’ve liked and it was so convenient tucking a NotePad into my bag instead of the usual overload of sketchbooks, drawing materials and a drawing board.
Sometimes you put a lot of effort into something, stand back in satisfaction when it’s finished and…it sucks! It’s wrong! That’s what happened when I tried drawing the foot on the right a few days after drawing the one on the left. Maybe I should have done them at the same time.
My childhood seemed to be full of wet Sunday afternoons, back in the days of the dinosaurs before the Internet or Cable TV, when few working class people had phones or cars so there wasn’t much to do except loll around the house. I used to help our Mam with her baking, she’d often bake enough to last a few days. Tasty but cheap fare – jam tarts, Teisen Lap (Welsh Plate Cake), fruit tarts, boiled fruit cake, Welsh Cakes. Pastry was made with lard, or hard margarine, or both, never butter (way too expensive). Cakes too were made with hard margarine; tarts and crumbles filled with seasonal or foraged fruits. These cheap but tasty treats helped to bulk out our meagre diet.
Today it poured down. Our glorious summer is well and truly over. So I baked. I made a Tarte Tatin for Husb and a gluten-free, dairy-free spiced apple cake for me. My digestive system has become more sensitive as I get older, so I’m learning a lot of new recipes.
I carried on playing with some Derwent Aquatone watercolour sticks that I was given a while back. I did a blend of Prussian Blue, Ultramarine and Light Blue a couple of weeks ago and today worked in some Spectrum Orange and Middle Chrome. The cat shapes are from a stencil I cut of our little Bill the rescue cat.
I’m used to using watercolour paints that dissolve when they’re wet, even after they’ve dried on the paper. These ones don’t which has implications for how I continue to use them. But for the time being, I’m just experimenting.
Now this will be ongoing as I’m planning quite a lot of work around legs over the next few months. But the staring point with me is drawing, always drawing, so I’ll be practicing sketching legs and boots for a while. At this stage, I’m getting used to perspective and foreshortening and also the actual make-up of boots and trainers. They’re complicated, what sort of mind designs them? I really struggle to draw them to be honest, which is why I need the practice.
I carried on playing with the coloured papers from the other day, zooming in on sections and enlarging them to see what they looked like. I don’t know if it will lead to anything, but sometimes you’ve got to just chill out and play a bit in order to develop.
I used Liquitex Heavy Body acrylic and an offcut of Bockingford 280gsm paper, scraping with a palette knife.
In April 2014, I went to Pakistan on an artist residency. It was amazing!!! What a fantastic country. Here are some of my sketches and the last photo is of me and fellow Swansea artist Hannah Lawson at the entrance to our group show exhibition in Islamabad. It was such an exciting month. I loved the clothes I bought there.
I’ve been feeling a bit under the weather for a few days so I had an easygoing Sunday, staying at home and not doing very much, like Sundays used to be when I was a kid. I had a scribble, looking at a corner of our living room from my comfy spot on the settee.
scribblah 