Drawing with brushes

I just can't leave graphite alone now, the genie's out of the bottle...or the jar, in this case a jar of Cretacolor graphite powder. If there's an element that irritates me about graphite it's the slow process of filling in large areas of shading, sure a blending stump and a putty rubber helps but it's still a slow old game laying down the area of shade with a pencil or stick. I recently ordered some bits and pieces to upgrade my drawing kit, foremost being a 2mm propelling pencil to replace the dozen or so steadler HB's I need to keep on sharpening (I like to always have a sharp pencil to hand), this natty tool and it's neat drum sharpener is as great as I remember them being way back when I used to do technical drawing, a gimlet point, easy in the hand and dead quick and clean to sharpen. Anyway, I digress, along with the usual consumables (stumps, erasers and so on) I had a punt on a jar of graphite powder, something I've never used before.



It's very different, dead quick to apply with a brush and very movable, one can keep on shifting it around with a brush or stump for ever and it lifts off incredibly easily with a putty rubber. It'll take a bit of practice to get the hang of but I suspect that this is the end of shading tedium. It's odd drawing with a brush mind.

Interesting times.

Looking back at the last couple of months I see . . . well . . . not much; here on my blog. I do, however, have an excuse. I've reached a crossroads; at long last I've made the decision that at some level I know I've needed to make for a while, to bin my printing and embroidery business (my primary source of employment and income). It's not a sensible choice but an inevitable one, under my managment the business was doomed to failure, once you find it impossible to motivate yourself to do more than 'just enough', and sometimes not even that, then it's time to roll the dice, to get out while the goings good, so that is what I'm doing. In the next few months I'll be busy with assisting the transition of the ongoing business to the new owner/operator but after that . . . well, there should be a bit more activity to be seen on the art front. The relief I feel at this is surprising, I'll be poor but able to take up opportunities that with a regular job would be impossible, interesting times indeed.

Anyway, in spite of that I have been doing more art than just farting around with sketching and my new pens, here's a couple of painting commissions I've completed in the last month or so:

Duke, soft pastels on 30 X 40cm yellow pastelmat.






Ruby, soft pastels on 35 X 50cm grey pastelmat.

Pens and pencils

Last week I got some new toys, a set of Copic multiliners. Drawing with pens is something I've been meaning to tackle for a while now, now I can have a crack at it with some decent pens rather than any old biro which has been the limit of my ink drawing equipment up till now.

Here's a few birds drawn with these, I'm rather enjoying drawing in ink, an interesting discipline.











In the last few days I've also made a start on doing some work based on my Antarctic trip, I'm planning quite a body of work on this subject so these graphite drawings are going to be the first of many.

Foray into the land of graphite

Graphite? that's what's in pencils isn't it? If you're familiar with my work you'll have noticed that there's not much of this particular form of carbon to be seen. In the past I've preferred to work with the rougher, looser medium of charcoal.
Last weekend I took home a sketchpad and whatever graphite pencils I could find lurking in the studio with the hope of finally getting into working with this elusive medium. Oddly enough after perusing my reference archive I've ended up working in and entirely new subject for me as well, flowers.

These are Pale Maidens, the national flower of the Falkland Islands. Both on A4 cartridge paper.

Horses? Schmorses

Well....it was bound to happen one day, I've had an inquiry about doing a portrait of a horse. This is a subject I've shied away from in the past (fnar fnar) but I've been meaning to have a go at. This, of course, has given me the kick I needed to try it.

So I dug out a reference courtesy of the Artist Reference Photos facebook page and had a crack at my first ever horse painting.

   Horse 1, soft pastels on 30 X 40 cm yellow pastelmat.

Clearing the boards

For a long time there's been a couple of unfinished works occupying two of my drawing boards....for the best part of six months as a matter of fact. Christ knows what's been holding me back with these, both are fine ideas and there's no reason not to finish them.

One is a simple painting of a nesting goose in the long white grass, illuminated by the low sun. The other is a larger landscape, a sunrise over Stanley looking east from the battle monument, the lights of Ross Road reflecting in the water of the harbour.

Both of these have been lurking in my studio, continually catching my attention almost in reproach at their unfinished state. Well, no longer. Over the last two days I've completed both of these malingering works and both have been incredibly rewarding to finish. Maybe there's some advantage to leaving paintings on hold. I've completed both of these without my usual fiddling with pencils and conte sticks, for the first time I've really found soft pastels working for me. Most satisfying.

Stanley Sunrise, 50 x 70 cm grey pastelmat.

Goose inthe white grass, 35 x 50 cm white pastelmat

Something new...

We had three old biddies...ahem...that is to say three retired teachers host a craft day in our house this Friday. They were teaching various crafts, sewing patchwork, flax weaving, felt making, watercolours & pyrography. The wife and I were supposed to be on our way to Stanley but were stuck out here; ferry delayed by poor weather.

Thought I'd have a crack at something different from my neverending pastels.

Pyrography:

Watercolours:

 

Interesting experiments, may well try expanding on these new mediums. Many thanks to Myra, Heather and Wendy for all their hard work.

A golden opportunity

See this wee ship: 

She's the Hans Hansson, a cruiser run  by Golden Fleece Expeditions who do charter expeditions to the Antarctic. The owner Dion Poncet had advertised for a semi-voluntary extra crew member for her latest trip so I thought I'd throw my hat in the ring....and I got the job!

So there we go, on Monday 16th January I'm away south for 6 weeks, South Sandwich Islands, The Antarctic Peninsula and South Georgia. I'll pack my drawing stuff and see what inspires me down there in 'the freezer'


What an opportunity!

Christmas commission challenge....

Now that Christmas is out of that way I can post about the three 'Christmas present' commissions I had this year. What made these interesting was the increasing difficulty and decreasing notice of the three. For the first I had a couple of months notice, nice, straightforward child portrait. No problem at all. A single, lovely reference photo that just about jumped off the screen and plenty of time. The next was a double portrait of two collies in late November, multible reference photos and a bit of compositional jiggling needed....Still no problem, a harder subject but a few weeks was still enough time to get the job done.

In mid December came the real test though, a big landscape commission (I find landscapes to be the toughest subject)...and I only had a matter of days...a very few days...to get it completed. It was a sunset view of a local range of hills called Rincon Ridge, fortunately they are right here in Fox Bay so I dashed out to get some references for the hills and foreground, a quick sort through my sky ref photos for a suitable sunset sky and a bit of photoshopping produced a workable composition so there I was, ready to go but it had to be finished, sent to towm to get framed and be back here before the big day. Really wasn't sure if I could achieve it.

But I did, Jane in the Pink Shop pulled out the stops to get it framed and sent back in time.
:-)

So here are my three Christmas commissions in order of increasing difficulty and tightening deadlines:

Ashleigh, soft pastels on 30 X 40cm yellow pastelmat.

Marni & Zia, hard pastels and pastel pencils on 30 X 40cm grey pastelmat. (really enjoyed doing this one)

Rincon Ridge, Soft pastels, hard pastels and pastel pencils on 50 X 70cm grey pastelmat. (This was tough but in the end rewarding, I didn't get stuck and it turned out better than I dared hope).

I learnt a lot from doing this painting, if I'm being honest with myself I was afraid of attempting large landscapes, the few I'd done felt like flukes. In finishing this commission I've managed to lay some of that fear to rest, I'm now quite looking forward to the next one (which BTW is already in the pipeline...and involves painting buildings as well as natural features....ulp!)

You've been framed!

Don't let the title give you the horrors, thankfully this is nothing to do with Jeremy Beadle. I've just finished framing twenty three paintings & drawings for my exhibition, that breaks the back of it and just as well, framing's an expensive business. Now I've GOT to sell some of these paintings to pay for all the wood & glass I've just forked out for.

A big heap of paintings:

This is the venue, the Jetty Centre in Stanley, nice isn't it?

The spare bedroom is dead...long live the studio!

Actually our spare bedroom is not dead, I've settled quite comfortably into it, one of the beds is stowed under the other (which in turn is used for storing large format card and pastelmat on....as well as being a dumping ground for drawing pads, rolls of paper, jumpers, finsished paintings, empty beer bottles etc). Most of the space this creates is taken up by an enormous worksurface (cut out of a sheet of plywood and stood on a pair of trestles) and an easel made out of a modular stepladder.

All this stuff is easily dismantled and the room can be returned to being a nice twin bedroom in the blink of an eye, 4 or 5 hours of lumping things around, untangling cables and scrubbing pastel dust out of the floorboards and it's as if I've never been there. Seriously though, it's great having my own studio space, I'm so pleased with it I treated myself to a nice chair.

My worktop:

My easel:

 My view:

Exhibition time

I've finally plucked up the courage to have an exhibition, I've got a venue, I've got our rather good local company Sealed PR on the case to do all the hard work...and I've got 10 weeks to get my act together (and my art together) for it....ulp.

Actually I am really looking forward to this, nervous of course but not too bad. Also gives me the chance to do that element of my gainful employment that I love doing...messing around in Draw designing posters, catalogue, cards, invites etc. Got a business cards done and the first draft of a catalogue:

I'm planning to exhibit about 50 paintings of which perhaps half will be for sale, should be happening at the start of October....quite a lot to do before then  as nearly half of the paintings I'd like to exhibit aren't even painted yet, still just ideas, I'd better knuckle down.

Internet presence

Been working on this a bit recently. I've been blogging for over a year now and had got to grips with my Blogger account and using google reader to keep track of blogs I am following, I do have a website which is still a work in progress so I'm not yet publicising it.

I can't even remember how I came across it now but I stumbled on this site: Lori McNee, fine art & tips, which has some excellent articles about using social networking to raise ones profile and increase traffic to your site. After reading through the advice on there I created my own artists facebook page and twitter account with links back to my blog. I then used RSS Graffiti to feed my blog posts to my Facebook page and twitterfeed to feed content from the FB page to Twitter.



Having done all this it did leave me wondering for a moment if I actually needed a website at all. The blog is a core element of my web presence, my development as an artist, achievements, thoughts are all recorded here in far more detail and in a more comprehensive layout than the website will be able to achieve. The Facebook page has up to date galleries of my art, my contact information is there on all three elements, blog, FB & Twitter....so what's the website actually going to do?....

After pondering it for a while I did realise that it still had a place in the scheme of things. This is the only place I can present a comprehensive, detailed gallery, the FB albums are OK but limited in what they can do in the way of searching and presenting information. There is also the credability of a stand alone website, It's strange to think of something as recent and hi tech as the internet as having respected, bricks & mortar type of entities but that's what websites really are, the fashionable and highly flexible areas of social networking are great but not everyone is comfortable with them, the website is a solid base for all these more intangible, changable applications.


Mind you my website isn't in the equation yet and still my internet presence seems to be doing OK...interesting.

Big project

Took the first step today on what could turn out to be an impossible project. I'm attempting to turn out a series of paintings based on nothing but my memories (as a seven year old) of the Falklands War in 1982. My parents, elder brother and I were incarcerated in our house in Fox Bay East during the conflict. The settlement was garrisoned by Argentine troops and my memories of the time are of the impact of their presence and the air attacks by the British.

There were events during that time that I still recall as snapshots but filtered through the understanding and perspective of a seven year old (and the passing of 29 years as well of course). The first stage of this process has been to try to describe all of these images that remain to me, so I've jotted them down and drawn thumbnail sketches of how I recall them.

I've no idea if I'm going to be able to get anything to come out of this idea, still, should be interesting. On a lighter note here's a graphite drawing of a rather cute rough collie, This is the first time since I've started drawing again that I've used graphite for a finished drawing. I'm reasonably pleased but golly graphite is a slow, restrictive medium compared to charcoal.

Hawk & Rockhopper paintings

Just browsing through our local paper and saw one of my paintings looking back at me from an advertisment:

My Young hawk and Rockhopper paintings are up for sale in Studio 52, fingers crossed!

Facebook Page

 I've always shared my paintings on my facebook profile and have had great feedback so thought I'd take the next step and publish my own facebook page, seems to me like a lot of people prefer to use FB for following such things rather than wrestling with stuff like google reader and such so I stuck a 'like; gadget on the bottom of my blog for those that prefer that option. There's a gallery of my paintings on there and an RSS feed from posts on here.

Now I just need to get my website finished....busy busy.

Extreme close up

I've been meaning for a while to do a series of pastels extreme close up images, not necessarily very small things but just a close look, the lichen on an old, weathered gate post, a rusty iron hinge, the feathers on a birds wing....that sort of thing. Some references will be photos that have been cropped to death, some will be still life, some macro photographs.

So I had a crack at one this evening, this is based on a photo of a rockhopper penguin, cropped until there's nothing except his eye and part of his beak and brow (I know I said I wouldn't do penguins but I've weakened).

For this I used mostly my conte (softish) pastels, just finished off the highlights & shadows with schminke pastels to get a bit more intensity. Support is 24 X 30 pastelmat in my favourite colour, anthracite. On the whole I don't blend much and in this painting I did none at all, also (and unusually for me) I didn't fix at all during the painting, bit of a departure for me this is.

"Destiny has taken a hand"

Charcoal sketch of Bogart in Casablanca:

 
I was inspired to draw this while musing on one of Bogarts lines in this scene "It seems that destiny has taken a hand". This musing was brought about by an incredible stroke of luck, just at a time when I'm wanting to take time away from my regular job to concentrate more on my art and the possibility of getting to a level where I can make some sort of living at it so more materials, the means to make prints, a website and all that stuff is needed. I've been wondering how I can afford this investment when wham! out here there is an annual sweepstake that was drawn last weekend with a top prize of £1500, It had even occured to me that to win that would be a real help, we Falkland Islanders are very keen on the Sweep so there's always a lot of tickets sold but this year I did win the top prize! a lump like that out of the blue is going to be a real help....pure luck of course but just when I needed it most, any other time I would have spent it on a holiday or something or just frittered it away, it's a funny old world.

Nervous as hell.....

Nervous now, got a couple of commissions to do. One pair of child portraits and one single child portrait, just waiting of the reference photos to turn up.

This is the first time I've been offered commissions and I've accepted both. ....If there's anyone up there watching out for over-ambitious portrait artists then keep your fingers crossed for me......

To trace or not to trace?

Something that struck me whilst working on 'unforgiven' is the difference between my portraits where I have sketched the basic form freehand or where I have used a more scientific approach (grid or trace for me, I have no lightbox), what I notice is a much looser overall finish to the pieces that have been freehand throughout almost as if how the inital sketch of an image is executed colours the whole painting. I'm not aware of any conscious difference in how I continue a painting past that stage. Is this down the necessity of making small corrections to the form as the work progresses versus the fixed, accurate template that one works to if the initial sketch is known to be 100% correct? I have noticed a tendency in my work to elongate faces, particularly noticable in 'Mr Rochester', 'Goodbye Crow' and 'Unforgiven' (which is still in progress so it will be corrected to some extent). I can see the necessity of an accurate start with some media (I've learnt the hard way that with coloured pencils or crayons there's no room for major adjustment so they need to be dead right from the start), pastels however do give a great deal more freedom, discipline & accuracy vs freedom and creativity...interesting.

Pieces that were initially traced (or similar)

...and others that were done entirely freehand.

Hmm...perhaps there's nothing in it afterall in the results, just feel different somehow.