Flying dog?

As I was finishing my charcoal drawing I saw a creature in the sky. A flying beagle type dog with a white muzzle floppy mouth and long floppy ears (alternatively it could be a loping hare). I don’t know how I managed it, but I didn’t alter it, I just chuckled! I’ll post a photo of the finished drawing later…

Charcoal WIP

I went to the Orme Art Group charcoal workshop today. It was run by an artist called Jo Watson and she taught us various techniques. Here I used brushed on charcoal powder smudged with a rubber tipped tool. Then I used willow charcoal sticks which you put on in a random way, then smudge again to lighten the charcoal. Finally you add darker layers to add contrast but you can tone these back to the paper colour, either by using a putty rubber you can shape, to lift off a layer of charcoal, or you can use a mechanical eraser thar rubs off patches to make the drawing lighter.

Mixed up phone photos

I decided to free up a bit of space on my phone yesterday as I was on over 90% full. I really need to get more memory on my phone as I have over 3,000 images. The trouble is when I optimise and delete photos it resets the date on them so sometimes they all reorder themselves and jump around in my gallery until they settle down. Then I end up with a lot of duplicated photos and I have to go in and delete the duplications, and I also try and edit the others and try and delete more of the ones I don’t like. I hope you don’t have these problems!

The featured image is a painting of frost on canvas where I edited it in a filter to change the colours. It just popped up in my photo gallery.

scrolling

📜

Oh I keep scrolling down the page

Facebook posts are all the rage

Never ending thoughts and hopes

I don’t know how anyone copes!

Addicted to that vertical scrolling

Dragging my eyes, they keep rolling!

Bits and bobs, this and that

Someone’s thin someone’s fat.

A work of fiction or of fact

But intelligent thinking is what’s lacked?

Sometimes serious causes emerge

But often it’s just a tawdry surge

Of endorphins keeping me awake

Switch it off. For goodness sake!

Throw down

At the end of a sketch out artists do a throw down where we lay out all our drawings for each other to see. There are fourteen sketches here but I think there were more people attending than that.

There are lots of things to sketch at Keele, there is Keele Hall, various interesting buildings and different architectures. There are also a series of small lakes and an observatory which I once visited, but can’t remember where it is. The number of buildings on the campus has really increased in recent years. There is now a full blown science park there. It’s a long way from when it’s campus was the base for an old British comedy called a very peculiar practice. Based in the 1980’s.

On the other side of the sky

I just looked at the sky from the other side… I mean I watched the film Gravity and it struck me that it looks much the same from above and below? Maybe the clouds are on a different scale, but they are still white and grey, the blue sea mimics the blue of the sky. We are truly a blue and white marble in the deep ocean of black space. We fall up to space, or down to earth, the thin atmosphere is all that protects us against hard radiation and vacuum.