New paintings and regular art updates.
It’s day 5 of the one inch drawing challenge for October. I decided to draw what’s in front of me. A dining chair with a small box easle sitting on it a canvas with a half painted lion and my snowman mug (just big enough for a decent dollop of decaff coffee). Lots of old paint brushes in the tray of the easle. Books on the floor behind…. I don’t care where I draw as long as I can.
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In October there are a few challenges to get you drawing. The first is Inktober. You can find various challenges based on this theme on the Internet. Each one is based on doing a drawing a day for the month of October. People use a hash tag, #Inktober2019 is this years I think. There are suggestion on what to draw, for instance halloween themes or autumn. These can also be found on line.
The second challenge is the one I may be doing. This is the one inch drawing challenge. You draw thirty one, one inch squares and do a tiny drawing a day. My only problem? I don’t know if I’ve got a ruler to draw the boxes!
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Drawn while waiting for a friend, the cake stands are bright pink and full of sugary delights that I avoided. I had strawberries and cream and a fruit smoothie which was made of smooshed frozen berries and very cold! This was a 20 minute drawing so didn’t go for any details. The woman walked along to the till as I was drawing so fitted her in at that end. Since urban sketchers last weekend I’m doing more of this kind of thing.
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Well it’s a reasonable attempt at a portrait as he was moving for most of it. Bug I do think he looks like a tired Liam Neilson! We’ve been together for almost 40 years. A lifetime. We’ve both changed. Got older and creakier. I think I’m lucky being the younger one. But I do want him to stay healthy and enjoy his life. Today was his birthday so I took him out for lunch and to a garden centre. His choice of present? Compost and a brazier to burn garden rubbish in. We’ll practical at least. Tonight we might go out again, or a takeaway. Then we have a couple of other entertaining things to do later in the week.
These are some of the illustrations I did for my thesis on pre Christian celtic art from the fifteenth century BC to the first AD.
Sorry they are not beautifully photographed but it’s 3.30am and I was excited because I found it and it’s the first time I’ve seen it for about 38 years!
I see now where I get my love of patterns from and that I could do some of these drawings now. I don’t know where I started with some of them…. Oh the confidence of youth.
There are photographs in the thesis but I haven’t included them as they were taken by a friend. They are starting to fade but surprisingly the pen and ink drawings I did seem to have stayed stable. Probably because it’s been stored in a drawer…
Right. Bedtime I think.
I had the great pleasure of spending the day drawing my friend Eve when she came and modelled for us at Newcastle Fire Station. One of the art groups I’m in, Orme Art group had booked he as a clothed model for the day.
Here are my attempts at drawing her. The red dress was really spectacular and hard to draw! I felt really out of practice but I felt like I was getting into it more as the day wore on.
I’m doing a 1 inch drawing challenge and today’s drawing is of a small tumbler with whisky over ice. It’s not something I do a lot of. But it’s been a long few days with a lot of travel and then singing with a choir this afternoon, I’m shattered ….
We had a lovely sitter tonight called Debbie McAndrew. She is an author and play write and also sometimes acts. She wrote a brilliant play called “dirty laundry” that was on last year . It was set in the past and was about the history of the potteries.
We had an entertaining session drawing her and discussing all sorts of things, including how she got into the theatre and acting and how the group got into drawing and painting.
I really enjoyed the session and think that I got some relatively accurate portraits from it.
I used pencil, charcoal pencil and black ink to do the drawings. The sketches are in a small sketch book with good thickness cartridge paper.
I like drawing in these books. There is enough room to fit the drawings in, and they are small enough to hold so that it is not a struggle to hold the book. Other people were using A1 or A2 sheets to draw or paint on but I prefer the smaller size. About A5.
Anyway I shall just leave you to decide if you like them…
Tonight’s life drawing model was called Richard.
When I’m feeling out if sorts I like to go to life drawing. I can sit and draw without worrying whether the picture is saleable. I suppose I could frame up some of these but I don’t really want to.
I find nowadays that my eyesight isn’t as good so I look through my glasses at the model, then over the top of them to see my sketch, half the time my glasses are slipping down my nose, which probably looks comical.
I tend to use a small sketch pad but if I go for a4 or bigger I use the back of a chair to rest it on. I used to use a donkey at college…a long thin stool you sit astride with a rest that pulls up which you can lean your sketch pad or drawing board on. the advantage of these is you can be seated without having to mess about propping things on a second chair. If you use a large easle its generally easier to stand up, as the legs of the easle can get in your way if you sit. Drawing on a flat peice of paper means that when you lift it to the vertical the image stretches and ends up elongated, this does not look good when you are doing figure studies.
Anyway, going back to the class, I did 7 drawings tonight…they call me prolific!
Mallaband-Brown