Just a couple of people standing around at the gallery the other evening. I scribbled them with a ballpoint pen into my A5 leather-bound sketchbook.
More Sketchbook Figures
#StandingStoneSunday 22
It’s #StandingStoneSunday on t’Internet today and here’s a view of the magnificent monument Pentre Ifan in Pembrokeshire. I drew it in ink and soft pastels onto a rough Khadi handmade paper. You can read more about my field trip here.
This short film from Cadw Wales shows how Pentre Ifan probably looked like when it was first built, surprisingly covered in, the stones we see now may have been just the skeleton of an even larger monument.
I did this when I was travelling across South Wales with pre-historian Dewi Bowen and filmmaker Melvyn Williams, making art while Dewi researched his soon-to-be-published new book, featuring the tale of Y Twrch Trwyth (The Boar Hunt) from the Mabinogion.
#Caturday – Black and White.
It’s #Caturday / Saturday again and here’s the little fluffy tyrant, Sparta Puss, photographed, scanned, uploaded into Adobe Photoshop and put through the Threshold adjustment to turn her into a stark black and white image. There’s a reason I was doing this – more to come on that …..
Scribbling At An Exhibition.
Husb and I went to the opening of an exhibition of glorious collaborative prints by Welsh artist Sarah Hopkins and Pakistani artist Muhammad Atif Khan at Studio Griffith in the Dynefor campus at University of Wales Trinity Saint Davids, SA1 3EU. And that’s a pretty big opening sentence!
The show is called Diptych and runs until Saturday 4th March during college opening hours. There’s also an interesting film of the way they collaborated to produce this exciting and luscious group of artworks.
Of course, I had to have a scribble! Would be rude not to!
Teaching By Faking!
I work part-time for a national charity, teaching art to adults. I love it, it brings me such joy. One of the techniques I use occasionally in my painting class is copying great paintings, encouraging my students to understand how the great artists worked and how they achieved their effects. This latest one (it’s my demonstration copy) is by the French Impressionist Claude Monet.
I started painting these “fakes” during the first Covid19 lockdown, following the painter Ed Sumner on Facebook who kept up a weekly painting tutorial, The Cheese and Wine Painting Club, for almost two years to raise people’s spirits as well as give us something really interesting and fun to do.
The 9 to 90 Art Community.
Here’s another sketch I did at GS Artists last week, at one of the Friday art clubs organised by the indefatigable artist Jane Simpson for the 9 to 90 art community. People from all walks of life pop in to try out different art and craft techniques. If you’re in Swansea on Friday afternoons, come along and have a look. It’s free and there’s tea and cake too,
Emerging ….
I started this painting a while back, from a photograph of two grown-up siblings on the beach back in the summer with a driftwood fire. It’s taken lots of layers of paint, doing a bit of work and then returning to it, again and again, the siblings emerging more and more with each layer of paint. They’re almost fully emerged now, I think maybe just one or two sessions should have it finished.
I’m using Liquitex Heavy Body acrylic paints, mostly transparent and translucent, onto a recycled canvas.
Mari’s First Outing.
Husb and I have been making a Mari Lwyd from a flat pack kit for a while now. Quite a while, we began it during the first Covid lockdown!!! The past couple of weeks I’ve been down at Swansea Print Workshop printing some of the costume with one of my Mari Lwyd lino blocks and earlier today we put it all together and took her for her first outing, to a Plygain in a local community centre. She’s HUGE!
The flat-pack Mari Lwyd, designed by David Pitt, is available from the Welsh educational company TRAC.
#StandingStoneSunday 21
It’s #StandingStoneSunday again and here’s one of my favourites, Maen Llia, a huge megalith near Ystradfellte in the Brecon Beacons National Park. Legend has it that the stone sometimes moves to the nearby River Mellte to drink ….
I did this when I was travelling across South Wales with pre-historian Dewi Bowen and filmmaker Melvyn Williams, making art while Dewi researched his soon-to-be-published new book, featuring the tale of Y Twrch Trwyth (The Boar Hunt) from the Mabinogion.
#Caturday – Another Filter.
It’s #Caturday / Saturday again and here’s a photo of a much younger Sparta Puss that I’ve put through Adobe Photoshop’s Palette Knife filter. She’s always been a cutie.
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