Gangan

Gangan spent the weekend with us, and spent some time this morning reading the Sunday papers after church. The light from the kitchen window was beautiful so I took a couple of photos of him to work from at a later date. This is my first rendition, in Quink ink and white pastel.

These are some earlier portraits of my dad.

Water

From the V&A water sketches I've been playing around with applying Quink Ink. After a while painting on A5 I switched to a square format. I used the end of a wooden skewer, then end of a paintbrush and a watercolour brush to vary the marks. These are not finished. When they're dry I want to keep working over them, maybe cut them up, layer them, wash away areas if I can. I don't want to introduce too many medium, I think I'd like to stick to inks, just playing with wet and dry.

No colour here

Only the lines of the bare branches across the road from my house. I spent an hour crouched on a folding chair in the cold drawing these with a dip pen in b;ack Quink ink on watercolour paper. Here's a tip; if you turn your drawing pad round so that the spiral-bound side is windward then you don't keep getting your pages blown open. I just wish someone had told me that sooner.

These are the kind of drawings I'll never be able to look at without being there again in the cold wind wearing an itchy scarf, with traffic rushing past behind me and the sun going down on my right.

Broken pencil and ink

At a huge art store in Manchester I bought, amongst other things, a pot of dip-pen ink in a fantastic deep and dirty red. I'd been reading about Jim Butler in the Artist & Illustrator's magazine, who draws city landscapes in ink with a stick over found paper. So, to try out these new inks I drew by dipping in a broken pencil end. The variety of marks were controllable to some degree, though I did find that the relatively poor quality paper meant that the ink soaked through to the page below. I have a range of coloured inks at home so I may have fun in the future doing some people studies using this technique.

Funnily enough, Jim has done a lot of studies Manchester scenes. Unluckily, I didn't have time to stop and sketch in the city that day.

Late summer

While the kids played football, I drew part of the wooded hedge at our local park. We are lucky to have such a beautiful space just round the corner from our house, and it's yet another reason I love living in this neighbourhood. Roker Park has won awards for cleanliness, and the children's play area is about to undergo remodelling soon.This drawing was done in the enclosed scented garden with a Indian ink finewriter pen.

Quink Ink

I know, more pyracantha studies. But what else am I meant to draw at 7am when I manage to grab 20 minutes while the kids are eating breakfast? And yes, that is a bit of green you can see there. All the way on the drive into work I was thinking about using inks on an impervious surface to depict the back lit leaves. I want to make the branches more opaque, with more texture and modelling. This project has legs.




Then, again grabbing about 20 minutes after work before getting the kids, I did these two colour studies at Doxford Park. I especially like the one on the left, and they work upside down too!

Portrait Party Entry

Amy and I decided to enter a Portrait Swap. And because it's the site's first birthday they're having a bit of a competition.

Here are our entries. We decided to both work on the same pastel paper, using black and white ink pens, and 2 tones of grey brush pen. This way we worked using similar techniques, so that our drawing styles would show through when you compare the two portraits.

Here's Amy's art site in case any of you haven't visited yet. Give her loads of support (I know you will). It has taken me months to bully her into starting to draw again and her Blog is her only way of reaching out to other artists.

Out of chaos comes.... chaos

Last night I grabbed some time to draw, and I decided to look at a retro yellow alarm clock that I bought from e-bay last year.

I started off by taping down some pastel paper to a board, making a square about 14" across. Then, with soft pastels, I worked in the colours. The paper was grey, and the shadows were grey, with harsh light reflecting on the glass cover of the clock. I didn't like the pastel strokes, so I smudged it all with my finger working in an anti-clockwise direction, which caused a lovely dark area between the minute and hour hand. I sprayed it with fixative, then painted over with inks - black Indian, canary yellow, and an opaque white. Then I stopped, as I wasn't getting anywhere fast.

Looking at it this morning I can see that the yellow needs to be much warmer, the shadows need to describe the shape of the clock and I want more detail on it. It looks mucky at the moment, but I don't want to scrap it. What to do next, I wonder? Any suggestions?

Che Guevara lookalike

The similarity to Che wasn't at all intentional.

That aside, I love how this has come out, drips included. And it's very much like the image in my head during my nap today.

Lisa, at Eudaemonia has been talking about perfectionism being paralyzing, and she's right. Even though I've been very productive these last few days, I'm still shadowed by doubts and fears. Lisa, and all those who comment on my blog, or even those who just take the time to drop by, all have a positive effect on me and my work.

The last of the inspired nudes

Edward Weston is an amazing artist. I don't find the shocking, or explicit, or romantic. Although his models he used were usually slender, I don't feel as though he's portraying them as the 'ideal' form. However, they aren't as brutally honest and raw as Lucian Freud's paintings for example.

I find them beatuiful, sensitive, powerful and intimate.

The last two paintings I did that day, the two shown here, I'm especially happy with. i was interrupted during painting the abdomin, and when I returned to it, I was totally happy with it as it was, and did not further work on it.

I also love this second painting of the breasts. I was never totally happy with the first one I did, and I'm glad I came back to try it again.

More inspired nudes

I used Quink writing ink which splits with water into blues, and even browns as well as black and grey. I didn't wet the whole paper, I started off working dry, finding the main lines, and added water to my inked brush to paint in tonal areas. I wet the paper where I wanted the ink to spill freely. This technique is an interesting mix of the deliberate and the happy accident. I only had to blot a couple of times when I'd gotton impatient and hadn't let an area dry before working adjacent.

They were all done on A4 paper, but I've cropped each one as I saw fit.

Inspired nudes

At last, here are the first of the ink studies from Edward Weston's nudes. I painted them in a craze, finding the lines and shadows, and translating these with ink on wet paper, which is a fast medium to work in. As I went, I lined up the paintings on the wall so I could see how I was progressing. I can see how I loosened up as I went on.

When I'd finished I felt full of energy, like I could take on anything. It was a real power trip. I'm not saying they're the best work I've ever done, but it was one of the most intense experiences I've ever had in painting. Now I'm itching to do some 'life drawing' from life.