New paintings and regular art updates.
Cat I drew at the start of march. I used an ink roller that you can blot out addresses with. I would have done more of these but the cat decided to play with the roller and I think it’s been knocked under a cupboard. I will have to try and find it. Sometimes the simplest experiments work well.
I noticed the letters on the roller are Greek, I don’t know why? If you tip it on one side you can achieve thin lines and also get some curves.
Oh yes! She tried to get my pen and rubbed her head along my sketchpad. I took a blurry photo and then drew this. Sometimes the paw comes up and she tries to grab my pen. Eyes staring at the tip of it. What fun… Maybe she was an artist in a past life!
Last day of April, almost the end of this semester, but I think drawing something every day has really improved my skills. Looking back at last year’s work before I started college I can see how my mark making has changed. Practice is definitely good for Art.
I used off cuts from my sketchpad to create windows for this picture. The orange lights are from post it notes and the green is another lot of post-it’s that I folded and glued to give a feeling of branches. The black was achieved with an ink roller that can be used to blank out addresses on letters when you want to dispose of them.
Frodo, drawn on a website called sketchfu a few years ago.
I liked it because it had simple tools to draw with, but you could get reasonable results. Unfortunately it was closed down a few years ago. I think the owners were overwhelmed by the amount of chat on it, the art started to become secondary to people writing fan fiction and stories, the site was getting full and they couldn’t afford to extend it. Then they started up a new site called Muzy and Sketchfu seemed to be forgotten. In the end I managed to save a lot of my drawings before the whole thing was closed down. It was very sad, a lot of people lost a lot of art that they had spent a lot of time over. 
My first outdoor sketch apart from in our garden or from a window or a photograph for a year. View of a tree on the Croft, Penkhull, Stoke-on-Trent.Drawn with a 6b pencil over about twenty minutes on our evening walk. I added black ink fine line pen and silver felt pen later.
Today’s #bandofsketchers prompt.. Spiral.
Spiral of wire weaving my friend Deborah did for one of my glass cabochons I made at Angela Ashtons fused glass workshop a few years ago.
The wire weave and chain is a deep bronze colour, I couldn’t really do it justice. There are coloured glass and metallic effect glass in the cabochon.
I’m happy with the drawing, it’s not perfect but it does represent it.
Five portraits, one five minutes and the other four are ten minute ones. Black calligraphy pen on cartridge paper. The lighting isn’t good so the paper looks a bit grey. People provided objects to add to the portraits. I really enjoy these sessions.
Today’s #bandofsketchers prompt was over… Today’s walk led us under this hawthorn tree that was growing over the road. Its in Hartshill on the way up to Queens Road. Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire.
OK, this was a doodle for a project in one of the weeks at college. We had five words chosen for us and had to create characters and situations for them to be in.
Mine were: copper, glasses, bedroom, sarcastic and star.
I’d made a crown earlier in the year for a virtual panto I was in. It was made of card covered in holographic stars. I finished the work, but now we are doing a project on creating a map. I was looking back on previous work and found this. It’s a map I think? It’s not what I’m doing for the project but it made me think about what a map is.
I would define a map as:
Describing a place pictorially with images, or using sound to give directions.
It can be imagined or realistic. Using icons or symbols to describe objects within the map. Indications of pathways or roads, ways to navigate the area. And rules to show whether places are only accessible in a certain way. Exits and entrances. Also is the map two or three dimensional, how is that represented. Lots to think about.
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!
Mallaband-Brown