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.