| CARVIEW |
I'm an ARTGEEK! I scribble. I print. I love it.
Last night was my 10th life drawing session since I started back at Swansea Print Workshop after a long break (see here) and here are the warm-up sketches. I’m aiming to improve my portrait drawing over the next year. There are two 5 minute sketches then a 15 minute one. I used a graphite block onto a sheet of Zercoll paper. I hadn’t worked with this model before, she has magnificent red hair, so I got out my Derwent Inktense blocks and my reservoir brushes to add some colour.
I’ve FINALLY printed my Mari Lwyd 2026 lino block. It’s been cut and waiting for some weeks but life got in the way. Here she is, the first proof and the inked block.
There are a lot of artists I really love, and two of those I love most are Suzanne Valadon and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. I saw a painting called “The Hangover” recently for the first time and it’s a portrait of Suzanne by Henri. Wonderful. Two of my favourite artists in one artwork! Here’s a link to the original. I wanted to draw from it, so I did this 10 minute sketch this evening, in graphite onto a heavy Khadi textured paper. I’m a strong believer in learning from the greats. The composition is surprisingly simple, you don’t need to go overboard to create something so wonderful.
I had to make some decisions today on how I would represent the skin in my portrait. I had cut around the main line drawing, I’ll refine it later, but the question then is do I carve out the main area of skin or not? The model has darker skin so I didn’t want to use a technique that would make her skin look white. I thought of a life drawing lesson I had way back when I was in Swansea Art College, back in the 1970s. My wonderful lecturer, Glenys Cour, asked us to look at the body as if it was a geographical feature and then draw contour lines over it, to show the rises and falls. So I got myself a pencil and drew onto my lino portrait and then cut the lines. I won’t know if it will have worked until I get to print it, which should be in the next few days.
A few years back I walked across the South Wales Neolithic landscape with Welsh pre-historian Dewi Bowen as he researched his latest book, “Hunting The Wild Megalith“, following the trail of Y Twrch Trwyth (The Boar Hunt) from the book of Welsh legend, The Mabinogion. The path of the Boar Hunt coincides with most of the major prehistoric stone monuments in this ancient and mythological land.
I’m running a weekend linocut course at the end of February in Swansea Print Workshop which includes a short film by Melvyn Williams of my creative exploits as Dewi and I hunted the Wild Megalith. Click on this link to find out more about the weekend course …
I carried on carving my little lino block portrait of one of the life models I work with at Swansea Print Workshop. I’ve done her hair and the outline of the main lines of her face, now I have to decide how I’m going to cut the rest. Lots of things I could do. Decisions…
Going back to February 2015 for these people pictures, mostly drawn in my sketchbooks, although the bottom left is on a piece of vintage paper that I marbled before drawing with charcoal. The sketches on the top left were done in minutes, those at centre left, done in seconds – really speedy. I love looking through my sketchbook archives, but you know what? I’ve drawn probably thousands of people, but I don’t make use of these sketches, I don’t work them up into compositions. Perhaps this is something I should do.
It’s #Caturday Saturday and here’s a new quick sketch of Sparta Puss, just a couple of minutes so no details of her lovely Tortoiseshell markings. I struggled with her tail, I kept checking but that’s the way it was positioned, looks weird to me on the drawing.
This was the final pose for the final hour at the recent life drawing session at Swansea Print Workshop. I’d familiarised myself with the model’s face with a series of quick sketches ranging from 5 to 30 minutes. Then I had an hour to play with this pose. I did a 20 minute sketch (top left) then I decided I wanted to change my drawing style and do something more sculptural which took up the last 40 minutes. I think there’s scope to turn this into a linocut – watch this space…
Drawn with a graphite block onto a heavyweight vintage paper (no watermark).
The middle poses in my last life drawing session, 15 minutes each, are when I start to focus and concentrate. I’ve done the warm ups to get the gist of her face, so now I’m really looking at the structure, proportions and details.
scribblah