Went to a 60th birthday party – going to a lot of these recently – and people were wearing fake moustaches. It was weird seeing normally clean-shaven mates with upper-lip-hamsters 😀 Of course, I had to have a scribble! I used a ballpoint pen into my A5 leather-bound sketchbook.
The drawings I did at the Swansea Fringe at the back end of 2022 are now being exhibited in one of Swansea’s live music venues, The Bunkhouse. It opened tonight, work by 5 artists in the downstairs bar. The top two rows in the photo are my sketches, the two bottom rows are drawings by Leanne Vaughan-Phillips. I cropped my original photo and shoved it through a Posterise filter in Adobe Photoshop.
It’s cold, freezing tonight, but this one is snug and warm indoors. Please look out for your pets in this awful weather and keep them in xxx Here’s Sparta Puss, through a Posterise filter in Adobe Photoshop.
I did a whole load of drawings at Crowleys Rock Bar in the Swansea Fringe back before Christmas and they’re going to be in an exhibition at another rock music venue, The Bunkhouse, in Swansea! Cool! The drawings are in my sketchbook which I don’t want to dismember, so I scanned and printed a selection at size A4 and laminated the prints, so they’ll be tough enough to withstand whatever a rock venue throws at them.
The exhibition opens this Friday, 20th, from 6pm and there’s also a ticketed gig featuring Mojo Jnr and support bands.
I had a quick scribble this afternoon, trying out a mixture of white conté crayon (used dry) and black Derwent Inktense (used wet) into a black paper sketchbook. The white worked well, but the black Inktense was lost and it made a bit of a mess with the white conté. So I went back in with a black conté to finish it off. The subject is the 1855 Columbian Press at Swansea Print Workshop. Which is probably my favourite press in the world.
Having a bit of a play with my Inktense blocks by Derwent onto black paper. I wanted to see if they would actually show up on a dark background and they did, really strong coverage too. I was just having a doodle, it’s not meant to look like anything.
It’s #StandingStoneSunday again and here’s a gate stone in a place called Parc Y Meirw (Field of the Dead) that I visited a while back with Dewi Bowen and Melvyn Williams. Sometimes ancient stones can be found in hedges and used as gateposts and this is one of a group in a hedge that aligns with the moon’s highest point in the sky, which happens every 18.6 years; this cycle can be used for predicting eclipses.
I drew with conte crayon, carbon and Daler Rowney artists’ soft pastels onto Fabriano paper prepared with gesso, charcoal and my home-made walnut ink.
It’s #Caturday / Saturday again. Once upon a time, Sparta Puss was a little kitten. A naughty little kitten. And small enough to run up the curtains. One day, I caught her soft-furnishing shenanigans on camera as she clawed her way up and down some voiles with a spiral pattern. I made a series of woodcut prints from some of the photos – this is the first of the set.
I think this little painting may be just about finished. I’ll sleep on it, but I don’t think I’ll be doing much more, maybe a little softening on the arm. I’ve never done anything like this before, working directly from a sketch and splashing paint randomly in layers, scattering rice into pools of watery pigment, and finally a very small amount of detailing. I used Liquitex Heavy Body acrylics in Indian Yellow, Naphtha Red and Phthalo Blue (red shade) for most of the painting, with some small touches of Dioxazine Purple and Titanium White, which is more of an ecru, at the end.
Here are the steps I went through to get here ….
I’ve swirled a final watery paint layer onto my two girls – this time in Pthalo Blue (red shade) from Liquitex, tipping the canvas so the paint ran across randomly. I dabbed at parts with a paper kitchen towel to reveal the yellows, reds and oranges beneath and threw more rice onto it, forming a sort of halo around the girls.
It’s psychedelic, which is very fitting as one of them is wearing a fly agaric mushroom hat – it has a reputation as a psychedelic substance – but it’s potentially dangerous too. This random approach to applying paint is reminiscent of some of the techniques the Surrealists used.
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