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New item in the pencil case!

A new favourite in the pencil case is my water brush. I've had this for a while - handy to carry around rather than a separate water bottle and container and paintbrush, but recently I've added some black ink to the water. This means I now have grey ink on hand whenever I want it! It makes it very quick to block in some colour or shading and I have been using it nearly every day.

This was the first experiment with it...

A Friday night in, watching an Italian cooking programme on the telly (or listening to it and occasionally glancing from page to screen).

In pride of place my beautiful Alice Palace print. I love it. The text says 'love, simplicity and calm' and it makes me very happy. Have a look at the Alice Palace website - I've read the blog for the last 5 years and its a real favourite.

Ladies that lunch

My Mum and I went out for lunch this week. It was such fun. Particularly as it was a very late lunch (3.30 - 4.30!). We managed to indulge in a good quantity of people watching from our window seat and I managed to do my drawing for the day in the gap between ordering or meal and our food arriving. 

Robert Clive or Clive of India as he is known, in 'The Square' in Shrewsbury. 

I had a play with photoshop to see how Bob would look if it were a very sunny day... he doesn't look terribly impressed. Perhaps I shouldn't have called him Bob. 

We even managed to have a very successful shop following our ladies lunch! - perhaps the secret to successful shopping is a good lunch beforehand and only an hour time limit...

People watching...

... is one of my favourite things!

I like to watch how people walk - slowly, purposefully, scuttling, urgently, thoughtfully, happily, sadly, excitedly, routinely... on their own or with friends, relations, loved ones

I like to see what they are wearing - is it related to the weather, where they are going, or coming from... school, work, dog walk...

I like to wonder where it is they are going to and what is on the agenda for today... briefcase, instrument case, handbag...

I've recently re-discovered speedy people sketches. On a small stretch of pavement that I can see I've been trying to capture those that go by in the short amount of time they are there for. The pavement is only about 30 metres long, and so it is under a minute that it takes people to cover it - coming into and going out of view.

A day of screen printing...

On Sunday I spent a happy day on a beginners screen printing course at Unit Twelve run by Iain Perry. 

I have wanted to get over to Unit Twelve for some time, their exhibitions always look lovely and the studio artists' spaces look like such fun.  It reminds me of my art foundation year - individual workspaces in a shared environment, with beautifulness on every wall (... but on a bigger, more grown up and successful scale!).

So, I took some images, mainly from my drawing a day books for print ideas. As I understood more about the process though I realised some of the images wouldn't work as a screen print, and so settled on this familiar friend:

A lino bunny that I did last term on my evening printing class. I drew a plan from this image... I don't think the background box shows up very well on the scan below, but it is there, with one ear just sticking out of the top of it. Originally I thought the bunny would be brown and the sky blue, but this wasn't sitting very well with me. 

So I changed the colours to a grey bunny against a purple, wintery sky and then the printing process could begin. This is the order that it was printed... 

1) the purple background

2) the grey bunny

3) the detail

 

These were the test pieces for each of the layers. 

We each did 5 prints - my grey bunny ended up in a slightly different place on the purple background on all 5! I did a couple of just they grey bunny to see what that would look like too. 

Here are the final bunnies - I confess I have added a pupil on them now, the detail was just a bit too tricky and I was concerned that the bunny could easily look very drunk/ angry /cross with a printed pupil in the wrong place! Not entirely sure I've got them in the right place / right size now, but at least the poor bunny can now see! My scanner isn't quite big enough to capture the whole image - I decided to make the whiskers and fur venture outside of the background and below the grey of the bunny.

It was lovely to see all the different prints that appeared. Unit Twelve have put them on their Facebook site for all to see!

Time flies

It is almost a week into February already! Although I may not have posted this week, I have still been drawing...

Some beautiful blossom, found on the grass (so I could take some home to draw in the warm) on a particularly chilly day...

I went on the train a couple of weekends ago, and challenged myself to draw something at every station we called at. Luckily the train arrived early and so I had a head start with the first drawing before departure! The rest of the sketches were even more hurried, which was quite fun.