I always was a mucky kid, climbing trees, making dens, digging the garden with my fingers. I haven’t changed. One good thing about being an artist is that I can be just as mucky as I was back then. Today I prepared a huge piece of paper for manier noir drawing.
- Starting to apply compressed charcoal onto stretched paper that has been primed with 2 coats of acrylic gesso
- Building up layers of texture, the rough wall behind helps.
- Almost there……
- Compressed charcoal covers the giant sheet
- A textural close up
- And rubbing it in
I was intending to cut up the sheet into smaller pieces to do a series of drawings, but I quite like this huge piece …. maybe I should keep it like this and do one giant drawing. What do you think?

So…shall I split this up into smaller pieces or do one enormous drawing?
I’m currently working on a series of expressive drawings of ancestral sites and if you want to see some of my other artworks, please click here.