Marvel! Exclaim! Enjoy!

It’s Swansea Print Workshop’s annual open weekend next week, Saturday and Sunday 29th and 30th November, from 10.00 – 4.00. Come and marvel at our antique printing presses, exclaim at the Tardis-like ambience of the unusual Victorian building, and enjoy the fabulous array of original prints on exhibition and for sale from our studio artists (Christmas is coming!).

It’s a fascinating place to visit and there will be refreshments as well. You’ll be very welcome and you won’t have a chance to just drop by for another year. Hope to see you there xxx

Practice Makes Perfect (But It Takes A While)

Reaching the end of last Thursday’s life drawing sesh at Swansea Print Workshop and I’m only just starting to get to grips with the new model. I keep drawing his eyes too close together, but the likeness improve with each sketch, as it should.

The Quick Poses…

The first 2 or 3 poses in a life drawing session are typically short, in our group we have 2 x 5 minutes and 1 x 10 minutes. When I was in Art College, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, we started with 30 -second poses and worked up to 2 minutes! That was serious discipline. These short poses give you a chance to isolate the important features in the subject, without getting distracted by details. I hadn’t worked with this model before and it was difficult getting his proportions right.

Portrait Drawing Week 3: No Bags And Wrinkles.

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I’m back at life drawing at Swansea Print Workshop after a long, long gap (see here) and I’m using these sessions to practice portrait drawing. I’ve set myself some goals and I’ll probably be doing this every Thursday evening for the next year or so. These are my sketches from week 3. This model is new to me and it takes me a while, and a fair few sketches, to get used to a face. He’s very young and I find youthful faces harder to draw, bags and wrinkles make things easier 😀

Sketchbook Archives: 50

Looking back at my sketchbooks from November 2014, there were lots of scribbled heads.

#Caturday: Winter Window

It’s #Caturday Saturday again and here that little block I cut last week, printed in black with a touch of gold foil chine collé highlighting the moon. The foil is from sweets (candies); there are fewer manufacturers making them these days, I find them in upmarket retailers and traditional old-fashioned sweet shops.

A Mari Lwyd Trio

I carved this Mari Lwyd vinyl block a couple of years ago and now and again I have a bit of a play with it. These three are printed with chine collé, which is a way of adding colour without cutting and printing lots of blocks. I’ve used lovely foils from sweets, there are still sweet manufacturers who use foils, but they’re getting fewer. I’m not keen on sweets myself, but Husb is happy to help out! 😀

Portrait Drawing: Week 2

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I’m back at life drawing after a long, long gap (see here) and I’m using these sessions to practice portrait drawing. I’ve set myself some goals and I’ll probably be doing this every Thursday evening for the next year or so. These are my sketches from week 2. The model is new to me and it takes me a while, and a fair few sketches, to get used to a face. By sketch 9 I think I had a reasonable likeness. Her hair was fascinating to draw, I had a great time with the mark-making, it’s such an important part of drawing, I think. I did some in graphite block and some in HB pencil.

The Cornflour Trick!

I’ve seen this trick on social media, using cornflour to take a look at a carved lino block, to see if it’s ready or needs more cutting. This is the first time I’ve tried it and it works! Yeah! I can see one or two bits on the cat block where I might do a bit more cutting and I think I’ll do a bit more on the bucket that the tree is standing in. Then onto the printing!

I just used normal kitchen cornflour and it worked a treat.

Tea And Scribbles.

I popped into  Waterstones Café in Swansea today, having a quiet half hour, sitting quietly drinking tea and scribbling away. I used the continuous line technique with some cross-hatching using a ballpoint pen into an A6 sketchbook.