09/08: CURLY CHALLENGE ... A LITTLE MORE PROGRESS

Well, despite getting distracted by the Showjumping at the Olympics, I did get a little bit further advanced on the coloured pencil drawing ... its evolving all the time with constant tweaking of the hairs/curls and I have altered some of the hairs after seeing this photo which really shows which ones look odd (despite being that way on the ref. photo) ... this is where a little artistic licence comes into play.   I'm going to need to brighten the highlights in the eye (to our right) also, looking at it here ..

09/08: CURLY CHALLENGE!

I started work on this yesterday and will get a little more done this afternoon.   I fancied a change from humans and what could be more challenging than all these glorious curls.

I had the pleasure of meeting this lovely character, Spock, earlier this year.  He belongs to a fellow coloured pencil artist who lives near me and whose work I collected from the London Gallery and delivered to his house when the Exhibition finished in May.   I always have my camera with me and couldn't resist taking a few pictures ... I think the photos were taken the day before Spock had an appointment with the dog groomer to get his curls clipped short.  

I'm working in coloured pencils (Polychromos) on drafting film with a black backing sheet and I'm making a few adjustments to the ref. photo as I want to reveal Spock's left eye (on the right side as we look at him) which is totally hidden by a lock of white hair which had fallen across his face.

Slow going, but its quite therapeutic

The edge looks a bit 'raggedy' here but that's just where I've used masking tape to secure the black backing sheet to my drawing board to stop it sliding around.   With drafting film you really need to decide in advance whether you use white or coloured backing paper as the coloured pencils look very different dependent on the background.    The drafting film itself is a semi-opaque/light grey colour

06/08: 'PLAYING'

David was out for the day yesterday so I had a little play on a scrap piece of brown pastelmat paper.

It does seem as though the Polychromos pencils are 'leeching' into the soft surface but the advantage of working on Pastelmat is that the coloured pencil can be 'smudged' easily with a piece of kitchen towel or a cotton bud and so large areas can be covered quickly.  I've sprayed with fixative to get a little more 'tooth' but can't add any more layers.   Roll on the time when we can buy 'Touch up Texture' as promoted by Alyona Nickelsen - available in the USA but not yet in the UK (although Jackson's assure me they will stock it in the future).   Just a little more tooth would enable me to fix that mane which is such a mess right now.

  To 'complete' a cp drawing this quickly is quite unusual - approx 5 hours for 17" x 14" picture but another time I will use a more conventional HP watercolour paper I think.

Anyway, I've called a halt to this drawing but may use it as the base for a similar one done on a different paper in the future

04/08: INDIAN MAN FINISHED

My last 'arty' update was some time ago now so I thought I'd show the last progress pics and the 'finished' article (finished, I think, but I may still do a little tweaking and I definitely need to think of a title).

This is coloured pencil (Polychromos) on Derwent HP watercolour paper and the image size is approx 16" x 12"

This is where I left off back in June and then we went to our house in the Canaries for a few weeks ...

We were very busy sorting out the garden etc., when we got back so I didn't get much artwork done but I took the drawing along to a meeting of the local Art Society one evening and managed to get a bit more colour added to his tunic (in between chatting, as you do).  I was making the tunic up as I went along as in the ref. photos he is wearing a blue shirt and showing some chest hair

Once I'd put down a few layers of colour I thought it looked too boring so used my battery powered eraser to lift some spots of colour and added some polka dots

 Inspired by some of the portraits we'd seen at the recent Regional UK CPS exhibition, David suggested I should put in a simple background ...... my pet hate (backgrounds)  but I thought I'd have a go and came up with this

BUT 'his lordship' then said ... 'I didn't mean anything as ornate as that - just a suggestion would do'

.... so I got the trusty BluTack out and spent twice as long lifting the colour as it took to apply

In reality the pictures aren't as grey as this - the background paper is white but I think I've had quite enough of this drawing for today so I'll call it (probably) finished and try to improve the colour/photos on a brighter day.

You can't help but smile at the antics of this little one .... really full of the joys of Spring.

Sorry for the fuzzy bits, it was hard to keep him/her in focus  but I think you can see enough hopefully?

02/08: NEW FOREST PONIES, DONKEYS, DEER

Yet again, I find myself apologising for the gaps between Blog posts.   Despite my antipathy to FB and refusal to get my own FB page I'm afraid I tagged onto hubby's account a while back and now find myself drawn in and spending too much time on that site ... although I don't have a dedicated page/art site of my own.

One of the main attractions of FB is that I don't have to downsize photos before posting them which saves a lot of time - my camera takes very large pictures! 

But I will make the effort to post more here as I do like Blogger better than FB and it doesn't become as 'b*tchy' as the so-called Social Media sites.

David and I have just returned from a lovely break in Hampshire where we stewarded for 2 days at the UKCPS Regional Exhibition which ran for nearly a month.   It was a fabulous venue with the Gallery being in the reception area for the Sir Harold Hillier gardens and next to the popular cafe/restaurant - so footfall was very good. 

We took the opportunity to do a bit of sightseeing around the local New Forest area - my last visit there was about 50 years ago!   The New Forest is approx 145 sq miles of Forest and heathland and is very beautiful.

The ponies are semi-feral and you can read more about them here New Forest Pony information
and we also saw plenty of deer and donkeys

Here's a selection of the (FAR TOO MANY) photos I took there

Now, if I can't find any good reference material amongst the hundreds of photos I took I need shooting!    

I also took some short videos but not sure how to add those to Blogger so will have to investigate as there was one foal who was absolutely full of the joys and made me giggle!

06/06: HINDU MAN WITH TURBAN WIP III

Well I couldn't resist tweaking and playing around with this today instead of doing all the chores I'd planned

I lifted out some dark colour from his beard with Blu Tack and made some more indentations before reapplying the darks.    I then tried to enhance some of the whiter areas of whiskers with my trusty Staedtler Lumocolour glasochrom white pencil which normally works well over darker coloured pencil colours but this time all it did was pick up the underlying black/blues and I ended up with some greasy grey sections in the beard which have been difficult to lift/erase.

I'll definitely not do any more to him/his beard till we're back from Fuerte and now I really must get some housework done, dinner cooked and bags packed.   

As always, we only travel with hand luggage as we have clothes and a house full of our own items awaiting us.   But we are taking half a dozen packs of Quorn chicken chunks out for a veggie friend (they are so expensive out there), a dozen paperbacks bought from charity shops - I read a lot when relaxing by our pool and can't always rely on finding decent books in the bars that do book-swaps, birthday cards for 3 friends who have birthdays out there in June and various other sundry items.    We have a 6am flight so need to leave home around 2.30am so I really need to get my backside into gear otherwise house-sitter and her boyfriend will be here and I won't be ready for them.

05/06: 3rd Work In Progress ...Hindhu man in Turban

Well I got a few more hours work done on the drawing today but hit an obstacle.     Despite having spent nearly 1 hour indenting (scratching into the paper surface with the end of a large paper clip) the beard still isn't looking quite right.

With indented works, its important to put dark backgound pencil in so the indented area show up well.

this started off OK but I'm struggling a bit now and wonder if I should have used a few different indenting tools to produce finer and thicker lines ...

Anyway this is where I finished tonight and I'll worry about it tomorrow .... or possibly in 4 weeks when back home from Fuerteventura .... Tomorrow I need to clean the house so the house sitters don't think I'm a slob .... even  though they're family members and know what I'm like!!

03/06: DAY II HINDU MAN IN COLOURED PENCIL

I finally got bored with the turban but reached a stage where its just about completed barring some tweaks once I've got skintones and hair/beard in place

Yet again the weather has been pretty awful here and so this photo is taken in artificial light and looks a bit dark - I'm working solely with Polychromos pencils on Derwent watercolour paper which is white, not grey as it appears here

We're selling raffle tickets (to win a Mini Cooper) for the Air Ambulance charity tomorrow so no more time for art until Sunday

02/06: FLAMING JUNE (NOT) ... AND FIRST STAGE OF NEXT CP DRAWING

Well what a damp squib June is starting out as ... who coined the phrase 'flaming June' anyway ... wet, cold, windy and miserable just about sums it up in Whitstable.

Anyway, apologies yet again for the big gap between posts ... and it will get worse.     We're off to Fuerteventura again next week for a month where we'll be meeting up with friends and family.    We'll be having some decorating work done at home whilst away and family members house-sitting for us.

I don't think we've spent more than 9 weeks in England since the beginning of the year.   Even David says we've booked too many trips/events - and mostly it was him booking them!   Looking forward to a more sedate second half to the year.

This afternoon I started a coloured pencil work of a lovely Indian man.   Unusually for me I didn't start by drawing his eyes but went straight to the folds in his turban and its been quite relaxing/therapeutic just working on those for an hour or so.   

I'm working with Polychromos (oil based) coloured pencils on Derwent watercolour paper.    The paper isn't my favourite support and I struggled with 'Sax on the Beach' using this paper, but I have quite a lot of it and hate waste ... so I'm persevering!

Its VERY early days yet but here's where I got to this afternoon.   I'll probably work on the other half of the turban tomorrow and then accentuate the light/shadow sections as a whole.    I'll save the face/eyes till back home from Fuerte

This picture is A3 sized and, as previously mentioned, its Polychromos on Derwent watercolour paper which is white (despite the grey cast to the photo)

The kitchen towel is there to stop grease from my skin attaching to the paper.

That's it for today, although I've just noticed that the panel on the right side of my Blog is VERY out of date and I haven't posted anything from 2016 ... its on the 'to do' list. 

27/05: CANTERBURY SOCIETY OF ART - SUMMER EXHIBITION

We're back from a lovely 4 day visit to Lyon, France.   Lyon is France's 2nd most important City and a World Heritage Site with lovely architecture, cobbled streets with fab restaurants/bars and was a large silk production region.   

The weather was a bit 'iffy' and we got a little wet at times but we packed a lot into our 4 days and travelled by bus, trolley-bus, tram, 'wally-trolley' (the new tourist tram that is being trialled so we got a free ride), a riverboat cruise and the funicular railway.    We visited the Basilica, a park with free zoo and a brilliant exhibition at the newly built Musée des Confluences - lots of separate exhibitions devoted to the evolution of the World and mankind.   I'm not usually a fan of museums but was really blown away by this exhibition.

I took hundreds of photos which need working through but I've got a few more ref. photos to add to my ever increasing folders of  'to draw' subjects.     3 are 'street people' to whom we gave donations in exchange for their permission to photograph them and the others are birds/animals encountered on our travels.      

Today I've been catching up on emails etc., and sorting out entries for the Canterbury Society of Art's Summer show which will be held at the Whitstable Horsebridge Centre from 22 June to 5 July.     I will be away for handing-in day but one of the Exec has very kindly offered to store my entries and take them to the Gallery for me.    One of the Society's criteria is that work must not have been shown in the Gallery for the previous 5 years.   As I have already allocated 5 drawings to the UKCPS Regional Exhibition in Romsey, Hampshire from 6 to 31 July, I've been scratching around to find pictures to enter ... 

I've cut a mount for 'Sax on the Beach' and framed him so might as well enter him.  I'm liking him a little more now he's been 'cut down to size' and put behind glass so I can't fret about him any more!  He's completed in pure coloured pencil on Derwent Watercolour Paper

 

I'm also giving Senor Molina another airing ... you all know what he looks like by now but here he is again in his frame .. apologies for the glare off the glass.    The frame is a simple black wooden one and the mount is a very dark grey

and I'm going to put a couple of 'oldies' in ... both pastel pictures which have been hanging around for too long .. time to see if I can find them new homes and make space for newer works.    

This is a snow leopard I photographed at a small private Zoo in Sandwich, Kent and the portrait was done about 5 years ago.     Pastel on Pastelmat

 

and finally a lovely 'Russian Blue' cat which is also Pastel on Pastelmat

Just got to print the labels for them and I can forget about them for a few weeks.

19/05: SAX ON THE BEACH

Today I worked more on the drawing of the Saxophonist and did a lot of erasing, trying to brighten up some of the buttons and knobs on the saxophone but I'm still not sure about it.   I'm much happier doing 'head and shoulder' portraits and concentrating on facial features - the musical instrument has got me beat I think!

David looked at the drawing this evening and was a bit 'ho hum' - which ordinarily I wouldn't worry about as traditionally any picture he doesn't like does well in exhibitions/competitions.   But I agree with him on this one ... so I'm going to stop working on it now.    I will put 'Sax on the Beach' into the (long thin) frame which was the main reason for drawing this image .... but may well find another subject to replace the saxophonist/fit the frame at a later stage.

Its possible I'll have a change of heart at some stage if I leave the drawing alone for a few weeks/months so .... watch this space.

Now I just have to work out what I'm going to work on next.    I have so many reference photos from our recent trip to India, and of course the fabulous Andalusian horses/riders photographed last month on Fuerteventura.   Whatever I work on, I think it will have to be in coloured pencil as I've been lucky enough to win hundreds of pencils over the last few months so I really need to use them - the pastels will have to wait their turn!

We're out and about tomorrow .... when the UKCPS exhibition finished I collected some pictures belonging to an artist who lives in a neighbouring seaside resort and will deliver them to him tomorrow.   Its many years since I visited Broadstairs so I'm looking forward to spending some time there and just hope the weather will be kind to us.  I remember 'skiving' off school and catching the train to Broadstairs and/or Margate as a teenager - hoping the place won't have changed too much in the decades since my misspent youth!

18/05: CATCH UP

Its been a busy few days - we were in London last Thursday, Friday and Saturday, then on Sunday we were out all day selling raffle tickets for the Air Ambulance Charity - win a Mini Cooper convertible!

Monday we were busy with Air Ambulance in the morning and then enjoyed a lovely lunch with David's cousin and her husband and just chilled out for the afternoon.

Whilst demonstrating/stewarding at the UK Coloured Pencil Society Exhibition I took along a picture to work on which I started about a year ago and got disillusioned with and abandoned ... you know how it is.     I needed something I could pick up and put down between chatting with visitors so this fitted the bill - in fact I did very little work on it as was chatting most of the time.

Anyway .... first off, just a little bit more fab news:

Senor Molina (as well as being awarded Best Portrait at the exhibition) was voted joint first in the People's Choice vote - based on voting slips completed by visitors to the Gallery during the two week exhibition.   I was really amazed as the Portrait display was on the lower level of the Gallery and it was noticeable that many visitors didn't want to go downstairs - either because they were in a hurry or because they had mobility problems so a lot of the People's Choice votes were being based solely on the pictures in the Ground floor gallery.

Anyway, this is a drawing I started in April last year.   The subject is a saxophonist who is part of a group called 'La Familia Flotante' (Spanish for 'floating family')   They are excellent musicians and regularly play near the Town Beach in Corralejo (where we have a holiday home - in the Canaries).  I specifically chose him as the model because if have a tall, narrow picture frame and wanted a subject who would fit the bill ... and the frame.

I gave up on the drawing halfway through as just wasn't enjoying it - normally I do head & shoulder type portraits which allows me to concentrate on facial features/detail and I'm out of my comfort zone with the saxophone and all its buttons etc.,

This is the last progress photo I showed ... in April 2015

and this is where I got to after the exhibition where I added more detail/colour, and a couple of hours at home today:

The photo is a bit dark as I've lost the light now but I plan to take a close look at the saxophone tomorrow and and try to work out all the twiddly bits ... If I succeed I'll carry on and finish the drawing so I can move onto something new without feeling guilty!

08/05: UKCPS 15TH OPEN INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, LONDON

Well we're back in the UK (briefly) having had a brilliant time in Corralejo, Canaries.   

We had a horrible trip home with a delayed flight as the airline had to switch planes due to ours having been damaged by luggage handlers who made a large hole in the bodywork somehow, then a passenger was taken ill on board, the 'alternative' plane had no sandwiches or food on board - just crisps and chocolate and NO white or rose wine!    When we finally landed we had to wait 15 mins for steps to arrive so we could disembark .... not impressed Easyjet!

So we finally got home at 4.30am this morning and apart from a bit of food shopping and an hour pulling the most obvious weeds from the garden, we've just chilled and enjoyed the lovely sunshine here in Kent.

The UK Coloured Pencil Society 15th Annual Exhibition opened with its Private View at Menier Gallery, London, last Tuesday and I was thrilled to learn on Wednesday that 2 of my 3 pictures had won awards.      Senor Molina won the Derwent Award for Best Portrait

So I'm very pleased about that ... sadly Alexander (the subject of my portrait) passed away in January but that twinkle in his eye will carry on.    This has proved to be a popular portrait and won a few awards so I hope he's watching and raising a glass 

and The Big Issue Seller got a Highly Commended Award which is quite topical as I photographed him near the Gallery when I was demonstrating at last year's exhibition.     He was sitting on the pavement at his 'pitch' near Guy's Hospital, wrapped up against the chill and I loved the colourful layers of jumpers and gilet.

 I will be demonstrating at the Gallery on Thursday and stewarding on Friday, so am looking forward to seeing all the pictures 'in the flesh' as they always look so much better than online I think.  

The exhibition runs till next Saturday 14th so if you're in the area, do pop in and say hello.    If not, here's a link to the UKCPS website page showing all the entries

2016 UKCPS Open Int'l Exhibition entries

If you click on the 'i' symbol top right of each picture it gives details of the artist and the work.