Hubby digging

Fork in hand, pulling up weeds, tweed overcoat on, wearing a deerstalker hat, and enjoying a showery morning at Shelton allotments. No sketching challenge today, but we later met with some friends at a social distance so I got my sketch pad out again while enjoying a pleasant coffee in a Portuguese cafe. My nerves were a bit jangly after two seperate meetings with people so I wore a mask on both occasions and gloves when I was weeding. It’s hard to think the world might be going back to normal even though covid 19 is still here.

Painting, nebula on a star…

Picture from the studio at spode last year. I thought it would be fun to paint a nebula onto a star shaped canvas I found. I’ve never seen another one. I also painted the Earth on a hexagonal canvas, but again I’ve not been able to find more. The shops seem to have less options to what they had even a year ago. I would really like to get hold of a circular canvas.

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Huchera Square

I played with this photo as the Huchera leaves look like copper sheets. The little sprigs of green in the centre look like tiny green people. I would really like a macro lens so I could take some very close shots of animals including insects, and also plants, together with things like lichen. Whatever I do, I find I want to do more. I deliberately take off centre pictures to make interesting compositions. I like trying to make patterns out of trees and clouds too…..

Thesis illustrations

I’ve posted these ages ago but since I deleted a lotof photos everything is jumbled up. These were drawings I did of a horses bit, and cast bronze fittings for a cart or chariot wheel.

I tthink I might have used a cartridge pen or a fountain pen to draw these. I can’t remember, they are almost forty years old. I can’t even credit the book I drew them from as I don’t remember and I’m not sure where I have put my thesis. I still like these…

Sun fire

Fire, digital drawing

This popped up in my memories on Facebook and I remember doing four of these, Earth, Fire, Water, Air in ArtRage oils, but I can’t find the other three. I did them as companion pieces to four acrylic on canvas paintings of the same subjects that are in my studio down at spode which I really need to start going back to now things are a little more normal.

I’d like like to do some illustrations for a child’s book using ideas like this. Anyone interested?

Doing mythological

and why not…? If you’ve got a dragon, why not go all unicorn… I tend to draw dragon heads a bit like horses heads. Unlike the dragon in ‘how to train your dragon’ where toothless the dragon reminds me of a black cat.. I digress. The app I used to create this is called something like free sketch? The trouble is I use so many of them that I don’t always remember which one I’ve used!

On this sketch I tried using a fountain pen, but for some reason it won’t make marks? This is why I say experimenting is so important. Learning how to use a tool in an app so that you can understand what it does.

I’m just getting the hang of it…

Found an app I could use….

I love doodling and experimenting so the dragon has been morphed a few times in my picsart app. Its still not quite what I was trying to do, but I’ve called this piece “dragon dance”. They seem to be having fun!

I could imagine something like this in a children’s book…crazy little characters all with their own backstories… born from the same clutch. Golden and silver, neon and harlequin…, some bigger than others, I don’t know…I will have to think of a story to go with them.

Last challenge with USK Stoke-on-Trent

It had to happen, after sketching since March this year we have decided to end posting sketches to the Stoke Urban Sketchers page on Facebook .

The thing is that not everyone that joined in is from Stoke or its surroundings. And not everyone wants to draw the challenges, so our pictures may have cluttered up the page a bit. So now we are opening a new page.. It should be up and running in September. If you like sketching and feel like joining pop over to Facebook. I will get the details and post them here.

In the meantime today’s prompt was ‘kitchen’ I decided to sketch part of the kitchen from the living room. I ache too much from my long walk earlier to stand up and draw the full thing!

Rousseau paintings

Orme challenge

We had to chose one or more squares to paint frome a Henri Rousseau painting as part of this months challenge from the Orme Art group. I chose these two. I’ve looked for the painting online but all I can see is one of him riding a tiger with what looks like bird of paradise plants instead of fruits? So I don’t actually know what this is called. I did two small watercolours and had to blot them a bit to take off some if the colours that were running into each other. The top left one was particularly difficult to do as I had to try and get the leaves to overlap. Also the colours I had did not exactly match the picture. Each image has a yellow number on it, in a large font…. So it’s a bit difficult to guess the details under the numbers. I hope to see everyone’s finished work this week when they are amalgamated together.

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