Yawns, epic struggles and contemplations

I have been so unproductive on the drawing front lately! Here are a few recent sketches from sculptures in the V&A Museum and Saatchi Gallery.

A pile of clothes on a pile of chairs at the life drawing (minus model!) session this afternoon at the EFL school where I work. The teacher did a nice introduction on contrast, cross-hatching, foreshortening etc, then got the students started drawing the lovely still life composition above. Everyone seemed to be getting on well, we had a nice mix of nationalities, the teacher was moving about giving the usual encouraging comments, then he got to one girl and said "Hmmm, Ok, well, it's always open to interpretation..." I wondered ooh what abstract thing will she have done? Turns out she was just drawing a picture of her cat. The instructions must have got lost in translation...

Hanging out

I paid another trip recently to Nunhead Cemetery, a beautifully overgrown Victorian cemetery full of cracked, uneven gravestones and the odd angel. These are a couple of pen and watercolour sketches I did there.

The garden series: part 2

Well, yard more than garden, to be accurate. The deformed dartboard has deformed further since I started doing this one! The ring with the numbers on it is now hanging below the dartboard! There are no longer two darts, but one, and that one has lost its point so is basically no longer a dart! To add further woe, the hammock I was doing this drawing from is on its last legs (moth victim?) and can only be used if you're able to distribute your weight completely evenly while getting into it (i.e. never!)

The garden series: part 1

The upper patio in the beautiful garden at my parents' house with plants, birds and sleeping cats a-plenty... part 2 will be an almost-finished sketch of the back yard in my house with its clothes lines and deformed dartboard, as soon as it stops raining for long enough for me to finish!

pen put to paper at last!

Speed-sketch of north-bound platform at Forest Hill Station.

On yer bike!

So, it was tuesday evening and I had an hour to kill round Victoria way after work, and I headed out to find somewhere for a nice (decaf) coffee and some sketching. After proving WRONG the theory that in London you're never more than 6 metres from a Cafe Nero, I decided to settle for Starbucks only to discover it was a miniscule one with NO COMFY SEATS! Booo! Then I spied some wicker chairs and tables out the back, so taking my vanilla ("not too much syrup it can be a bit too sweet") latte with me and ignoring the voice in my head saying "Er you've got a horrible cold and sore throat, stay inside!!" I sat myself down, looked up and saw I had a perfect view of Westminster Cathedral. And... decided the viewpoint was a bit too difficult, so drew this lovely Boris Bike instead. Of course, it hadn't occurred to me that somebody might actually want to hire a hire bike, so there were a few hairy moments when people came over, fiddled about with keys and cards and things and I immediately speeded up my sketching, but fortunately it seemed there was something wrong with it so my subject was left be for me to finish. Result! And by the way, the left handlebar is higher than the right one in real life, not just my measurements gone wrong. No idea why.

South Downs Scavenger Hunt!

Location: South Downs, near Brighton
Date: 23/04/11
Mission: Porter family walk
Findings of mission: One red admiral butterfly (dead). One sunburnt neck (mine). Lots of just-too-big-to-still-be-cute lambs. That my Mum's sandwiches (speciality: the "little bit of everything that's in the fridge" one) are still the best.

Here's a bit of pencil for a change. I thought such a delicate subject deserved a more delicate medium than my usual pilot pen on a bit of scrap paper.

Jurassic Park!

Actually, sorry, it's just Crystal Palace Park in beautiful South London. This is one of the fantastic dinosaur sculptures (Iguanodon, to be precise) from 1854 which are dotted around a few islands in a small lake. It's actually quite difficult to draw a creature you don't have any reference images of in your mind already. Fortunately, nor do other people so it doesn't really matter if it's not that accurate!

Giant seagulls, footwear

After cream tea, we headed down to the beach where I DID get my swim... It was 6 o'clock, not exactly boiling and still APRIL remember - but there were a few odd people paddling and I was determined to go in! And it was FREEZING! Anyway, back on the pebbles (no sand round here!) the sun was setting over the rocks making for nice silhouettes of the children playing in the background. There were some seagulls milling about which I wanted to include in my sketch. One of two things happened here. a) My placing and perspective were all wrong and the seagull subsequently looks e-nor-mous. b) My drawing abilities are 100% perfect, and this was in fact the GIANT SEAGULL mentioned in the previous post.


Plus BONUS footwear sketch to add to the summer air of the post and point out again the novelty of SEA-SWIMMING and FLIP-FLOPS in April in the UK!

Afternoon Tea

Down on the south Coast on Easter Sunday, this was the delightful scene as I sipped tea and ate scones (clotted cream or jam - which do you apply first??) in the garden of a little tea room in Rottingdean - what you can't see in the other direction are the scruffy lines of washing and a giant seagull ready to swoop and make off with your food if you weren't careful!

Southwark's cultural delights

This little angel with an arm missing (intentional) and one black eye (unintentional) was in Nunhead Cemetery over in SE15, probably one of the most peaceful places in the borough. I am tempted to add some watercolour to it... will post if I do!

London's cultural delights

I popped into the V&A museum after work one day for some inspiration and came across these guys, obviously at some kind of naked tea party, fighting over the last custard cream. Despite the overeaction to a fairly trivial situation, they made for good subjects.

Home sweet home

My bedroom on Landells Road. I was going to use a bit of artistic licence and leave out the unsightly drying rack, but thought no! What has drying rack done to be excluded? It deserves a chance as much as the more, er, sightly things, like the tv and my hifi from 1994... anyway, it turned out to be my favourite bit of the drawing!

Getting started

I was inspired to start doing more drawing and posting online after a trip to Sweden last month to visit my brother and his wife - she is an artist and has her own lovely blog http://justonedrawing.blogspot.com/, and she also introduced me to Danny Gregory's The Creative Licence - so how's this for motivation, I got started on the plane ride home, with this profound, mind-boggling drawing (myself drawing myself drawing myself!!) of reflection in window.

Hello!

Wow, back on blogger for the first time since 2008. Very exciting!! I will be posting drawings, of this and that, everyday life etc, maybe with a bit of text depending on whether the artwork needs it or just speaks for itself, man, or if I just feel like rambling, I will also be trying to limit my use of commas, ... and exclamation marks!!! (Just getting some out of my system!)