Rummaging through the archive

Mr G went out today, and the Girl and I were left alone in the house to amuse ourselves.

Sometimes, when Mr G is out, I have the urge to move the furniture around.  Mr G hates change, so I always have to wait until he's out before I can get to work.

With the advent of dark evenings and cold weather, I've recently revived plans to install a large hot woodburning device in our three-bed chimney-less semi-detached.  Primarily this has involved drawing little scale paper cutouts of our living room furniture and playing around with different arrangements on graph paper, trying to get everything to fit.  It has also involved emptying the "booze shelf" under the stairs to shine a torch into the ceiling void, to investigate the run of heating pipes...

But while considering the living room furniture, it occurred to me that certain things could be put to better use.  So I set to - emptied the blanket box in the living room, took miscellaneous things to the charity shop, and then re-filled the box with all my teaching stuff. 

Having created space in the office by removing the boxes of teaching stuff, I then discovered that there was room for another desk - for me.  Because you can't have too many desks....And so then I had to rummage in the back of the garage behind all the "spare" bikes for the desk top I knew I had, and the legs to go with same....

Quite a restrained day by my standards, no wardrobes were involved.

Then I spent the rest of the day sorting through all manner of stuff to create some space on the shelves above my new desk. 

And I found these:

We shall never know if the witch and her cat were reunited...

and finally,

A scary and uncanny likeness!

Happy Halloween everyone.

Not that we celebrate...to see just what we post on our front door, have a look at Mr G again:

A Charm for Halloween

Seaweed 2

There's more!

But first, a couple of seascapes - trying to capture the colours

and now the seaweeds...I think this one could be translated into a fabulous felted scarf, all waves and undulations:

And now the first of the "paddling" sketches

I tried blind contour drawing, where you look at what you are drawing and not your page.  I used a sharp pencil and added the black fineline and the paint when I got back to the tent.

Because the beach is just such a huge expanse of sand, the tide comes in and goes out very quickly - so the seaweed is constantly moving, swirling gently in the currents.  It makes it challenging to draw, but I love these little paintings:

This is what it looks like before I add the paint

Bit faint, nevermind.

Thus emboldened, I tried a crab.  It was alive and I had to mind my toes

and I found it hard to keep track of how many legs it had.

Here is my favourite part of the beach, about 1km from the dunes, where the low tide is at it's furthest point, and where the sea comes round the little island and meets itself, creating fabulous cross-ripples

We also drew in the sand with shells, which was incredible.  Try it!  It is so easy to create fabulous flowing patterns, I'm almost tempted to construct a sandpit at home so I can do some more.  It's either that or looking a twat at Newhaven, and everywhere else round here is shingle!

I forgot the camera so I had to redraw my sand drawing into my sketchbook

I've no idea what this little creature is, but I think it would make a great felt sculpture

I discovered that I can't draw seagulls

and I need to work on my swallows

Finally, here's one from another sketchbook using paper collage.  I added to it today and I'm rather pleased with the result

I am so pleased with all that I did on holiday, and only wish that I'd done more - but injured whippets weren't able to run on the beach in case the "wound" got sandy, so we lost a fair number of days to that.  There's always next year...

When I wasn't falling asleep or sketching, I read two books that really helped with the knotty problem of daring to put pencil to paper.  Actually, one of them is still being read - and the other is going to be re-read very soon.

If I can sort out my Amazon sidebar, I'll put the links up.  The first book is "Art and Fear" by David Bayles and Ted Orland, and the second is "The Confident Creative" by Cat Bennett.  Highly recommended!

Acoustic image transfer

After taking a multitude of photos at Ightham Mote  (see previous post) I was then faced with the inevitable problem of what to do with them all.

First I dumped them all onto the PC.
Then I made a collage in Picasa.

Then I thought I would like to have print outs of the patterns, as it was the patterns that caught my eye and I wanted to record them - which is why I took over 100 photos - but printing out photos of dark wood carvings would use up all the printer ink, which as we all know is one of the most expensive liquids on Earth.

So I transferred a photo to Photoshop and tried to invert it, so the dark became light and vice versa, thinking I would then just be able to print the "lines" of the design.  But it just looked like a plaster cast and I knew it wouldn't print.

So in the end there was nothing for it but to reach for a piece of paper from the scrap paper tray, and the first writing/drawing implement to hand, which happened to be a black rollerball, and transfer the images acoustically.  By hand.  Drawing.

And I think I'm quite pleased with the result.  Not brilliant, but not too bad.

It also dawned on me that this is precisely what "everyone" tells you to do - draw from the original.  And wouldn't you know it, they're all right.  And it only took 5 minutes to do these scrappy little sketches, so I could well have just plonked myself down on the floor of Ightham Mote and drawn them there and then (ten year olds and short attention spans permitting). 

For some reason I was reminded of my first summer at college when one afternoon I drank the best part of a bottle of wine whilst sunbathing on the roof of the halls of residence, and suffered the inevitable consequences*.  Sometimes you just have to find these things out for yourself, often the hard way.

*I didn't fall off the roof, but it felt very much as if I had.