Remembered scary tree

Oh I used to run past this tree. I was convinced as a child that it was inhabited by a ghost. As part of this terms college work we had to remember some landscape from our childhood and this was what I thought of.

I’ve probably missed out trees and I can’t remember if there were houses in the background. But it will remain with me forever!

Mark making.

Not a good photo, but this was me drawing different marks as part of a mark making workshop.

It was supposed to be in pencil but all I had was a blue pencil crayon. I also tried rubbing over the top of an embossed tin. You had to come up with as many different marks as you coukd in a five minute period. It gets your mind working… Good for creativity.

On

OK, a strange one of our living room light, we have textured paper on the ceiling (courtesy of the builder who did up the house). Bright felt pens and dark shadows. The light is on.

Today’s #bandofsketchers prompt was the word ON.

Sometimes it’s hard to know what to do for these prompts. I was thinking of drawing a bird on a twig, but it went dark before I got round to it.

Positive and negative

Sundays #bandofsketchers prompt.
Finally did a positive/negative self portrait after trying to think what I could do. I used the edge of a page cut off and added to the centre of this to make an interesting division.
Sometimes the challenges are really hard to do. I was going to draw a battery! Not exactly interesting. The negative side of the photo really lacked detail even when I tried changing the exposure.

Portraits with splodges

Ten minute portrait studies with black paint splodges from bubble wrap. I used watercolour and black ink pens for the portraits. We did some minoprint a few weeks back but I found gluing down bits of paper then drawing over the top difficult so tried this instead. It also makes you consider where to paint the face!
We were using found items to add interest. My favourite is the pot of brushes obscuring the face of one of the sitters.

Plum blossom

View from the kitchen window. This is the little plum tree ar the bottom of the garden. There is a cherry tree trunk in front of it and branches from that obscure the view. I decided to leave that out. I painted with watercolours. Palest first, then the pale greens and blues. It’s hard to fit the dark colours in without leaving white edges but I have never used masking fluid to hide the paler areas and I don’t want to start now.

X

Dragon

Seen in a shop in Llandudno in 2019.

I would have bought it if I had space in my house. The flame like decoration makes it appear as if it were molten. Like magma or lava erupting from a crack in the earth. Like an Icelandic fumerol. So we’ll modelled, gnashing teeth, mouth open, ready to spit flame.

Welsh dragons are amazing symbols, whilst the English Saint, St George, is famed for killing one. Anyway, I still wish I had bought him. X