Inquisitive

Back in November I posted two drawings of my new born granddaughter I had made from photos. She was pretty much asleep all the time back then.
What a difference eight months makes. Here are recent sketches, first, from yesterday, and some others a month or so ago. These are pretty rough. She is now crawling. An endlessly curious self entertainer, she is a great model, but does not stay still. I am learning both how to draw a baby and how to capture her likeness quickly.

She is already inquisitive about the relationship between images and real palpable things. She is curious what I am doing with my pencil, which clearly relates to her in some way. I don’t think it will be long before she wants to start her own mark-making.
First sketches (with more hair) are yesterday, and then are the older attempts.

These are the older pictures from before she was crawling. Still moving non-stop.

Hawksmore Wood

Trans Pride, Brighton,

On the Trans Pride march in Brighton last weekend, I carried a bag of art equipment and had drawings planned in my mind. However, my 18 year old offspring did not allow me to drop out of the crowd, find a vantage point and sketch. I have had to make do with memory and photos as references. This is my first sketch. More to come.

Hot summer day: Manchester Cathedral and Gandhi

strong lines

I chanced on the book Body and Soul by British artist Eileen Cooper RA. I love her strong lines and deceptively simplistic figures.
Here, some of the fast sketches (between 2 to 5 minutes) I scrawled in a shape in crayon and then drew with brush in gouache. In others, with up to 20 minutes, I outlined in crayon and let the paint settle over the top.

Fragmented views

“… but the space had become partitioned into ten boxes, so that I no longer had a single unified picture of the view before me.” Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro.

I used an idea from Ishiguro’s novel, in which cognitive vision fragments under stress into boxes, as a framework for these twenty-minute life drawing poses. They are constructed in graphite then blocked in using conte crayon. Later, as a planned exercise, I painted over this in gouache.

Below are the sketches from the other shorter poses, all completed at the life drawing session.

Many of us regularly exchange comments on our blogs. Over the next few weeks, I am going to set up a artists’ discord server. Discord is a social media platform that enables communities of friends to build and chat freely. Please let me know if you would like to join this (or if you already know of a good artists’ server that already exists).