prepared ground

This is an idea I took from Rosie Scribblah, an artist in South Wales whom I know from her blog and whose work I greatly admire.  A while back she posted many sketches on prepared grounds, made of brown paper fragments pasted into the sketchbook.  I tore up my lunch bag and stuck it onto some pages.  On others I applied acrylic paint.  This was done weeks before my using the pages to draw.  The idea was to fragment and distort my thinking while translating observation into drawing.

Here are a mixture of drawings.  The prototype Mars exploration suit, giant deer skeleton and trolley bus were done this weekend in the Think Tank, Birmingham on an Urban Sketchers session.  The first was built on an area of yellow paint, heavily textured.  The skeleton was drawn on a page covered with a mix of green and rose paint, greying where they met.  The drawings were done in fountain pen and conte crayon.  Mixed in with these are my first attempts to use prepared grounds, birds drawn from life onto brown paper and paint, one from 2014 and the others from a week or so ago.

As an aside, I have watched Rosie’s fascinating artistic journey across her recent blog posts as she abstracts from the landscape to produce stunning images of ancestral stone monuments in the South Wales hills.