paintings prints and stuff

Another drawing of my daughters cat, sleeping this time with her beautiful bushy whiskers curling, fur glowing in the sunlight. Again in the A4 moleskine folio sketchbook, done with a mix of Lyra and Polychromos pencils.  This one is much closer up, so the fluffy, overlapping texture of the fur shows much more with lots of drawing back in with the Jakar eraser for the pale over dark sections and the whiskers. I deliberately gave the background a mauve/blue haze of colour to cool down all those warm glowing colours and offset them. detail of details drawn back in with the Jakar eraser You can see the layers of colour in this detail and the lines drawn back in with the Jakar eraser, clean back to the cream moleskine paper.

First Snow, mixed media on card This was my postcard done for the postcard exchange this month. It started life as a demo to students of oil paint used with a palette (painting) knife on card.  (My tutors at uni were insistent that painting knives had cranked handles and palette knives, for mixing paint, not painting with, were straight but habit makes us all just say 'palette knife' I think, even if not strictly correct?) It languished unfinished until I found it and decided to finish it in coloured pencil - it's about 6/6.5 inches wide as far as I remember - it was posted a while back. Oil paint, used on paper or card, takes oil based coloured pencil brilliantly.  (Polychromos, Lyra pencils) It was done from memories of the first snow fall, which came very early last year.

Still life, stage 2, moleskine folio sketchbook - playing with patterns and composition I've worked a bit more on this one but there is still more to be resolved.   It's done in a mix of the Lyra pencils that I won and the Polychromos that I had.  There is a lot of layering of different colours to get subtle transitions happening. details: and potential crops for the finished piece: I like the squarer format of the second crop.  What do you think? Now time for decisions, what to change, what to lose entirely, what to darken, where to draw back into it with my Jakar eraser to regain light lines,  whether to erase the area outside the crop lines and leave an edge showing if I decided to put it in a mat  .......  push, pull, edit and change :>) Photographing it in dull natural light has made the colours much truer and shows the rosiness of the coppry/rosy leaves and vase better than in the stage one photos .

Work in progress This one is a development in a series I was working on - the original arrangement was very traditional, set up by a friend.   The colours appealed to me but not the arrangement, so I decided to play with the shapes and invent some patterns. The colours are terribly difficult to show as the coppery rose colours don't come out well - the vase and some of the leaf patterns are a really coppery rose colour and not as brown as they appear here.  There is also a lot more variation in the blues as they slide from greeny to puplish.  The coppery/rosy colours play beautifully against the turquoises and blues but it isn't picked up well by the camera :>( I moved objects around, played with pattern - leaf patterns on vases or material blurring into real leaves, the difference between reality and pattern blurred. It's one I can work on in quiet moments in the evening, when the TV isn't exactly absorbing.  It's in an A4 moleskine, which means I can...

work in progres s   Penwith, on the Moor, Approaching Rain, Rembrant coloured pencils,  about 12 inches tall. I've been using my lovely prize Rembrandts to check them out.   I wouldn't normally use cp's alone to work on an image this size - I'd go into mixed media and use some watercolour to underpaint.   That's partly because I like to work fast and partly because I like the wider variety of marks you can make by mixing media. It's looking a bit too fairy tale at the moment, not yet rugged enough.  The foreground is obviously only just begun, lots more to do to that if I decide to finish it.   It may just stay an unfinished experiment in the sketchbook though.  There are more subtle veils of colour than the camera ever picks up :>(   - there are amber colours in the sky, soft and pale but echoing similar colours in the fields.  The camera picked up the pale pinks but not the amber.   It has made the clouds a...

Small cardoon flower 1 , coloured pencil and biro in moleskine sketchbook, Vivien Blackburn One of my students (thank you Gill :>) ) kindly brought these cardoons in for me to draw. There is something really interesting about thistles/cardoons/artichokes to draw - the contrasting textures and fascinating shapes. The sketch above is biro with coloured pencil and the one below simply coloured pencil. Mostly the pencils are Polychromos and Lyra. I really like the way that cp's work on the paper in a moleskine. It's very limited paper in the materials I can use on it - ink, which I only use occasionally or pencil/coloured pencil. I wish it was possible to buy the paper in larger sheets though. Does anyone know if the new Folio moleskine is the same paper? that strange sort of waxy finish? If it is I'd like one, if it isn't then I wouldn't bother as I've got nice A3 cartridge paper sketchbooks already. Small cardoon flower 2, coloured pencil in moleskine s...

Lyra skintones set of coloured pencils - swatches I really like this set of Lyra skintones coloured pencils - if doing a portrait I'd want to add at least a deep dark blue to help with the cool darks and probably other colours - but they are lovely for sketching with in a mono/limited palette way. This was a quick demo sketch of a jar containing erasers and a pencil sharpener from the art cupboard at college. It's good practice to do observational sketches of every day objects and shows students that almost anything is worth drawing :) and this was my cup of tea that went cold while I sketched :) I'm hoping to get on with painting this weekend. .

I should be getting on with all sorts of other stuff but couldn't resist playing a bit more with the moleskine and lyra pencils. This is from a photograph taken when this little monster was really tiny, The colours of the skin tone set are perfect for her fur. The moleskine is really nice to use with coloured pencils, I like the smooth surface and the ease of rubbing out to draw back into colours . I don't use coloured pencils in the way that many people do, I'm not interested in creating a painterly smooth finish with no paper showing - I like to use them freely, in a scribbly way, more as a drawing medium, using the paper as another element. Incidentally, she may look sweet but she was busy chewing my husband's fingers with very sharp little fangs!

A quick sketch of the crowd at the Renoir exhibition - done at the time in biro and coloured later with those Lyra 'skin tones' set of coloured pencils - I really like them :>) - these are on loan from the college I work at but I must buy a set. They have a lovely range of colours from honey, through siennas, cool browns, dark browns, honey and an almost caput mortem - that dead purple (literally dead head in Latin from the colour of corpses!) that's ideal for some shadows. The tiny lady with the bun at the front I just had to draw! She had so much character, She had a hunched back and this suit with incredibly wide shoulders and that lovely cottage loaf bun hairstyle. I was exhausted by then, sitting listening to the headphones on the benches and trying work up the energy to move on :>) Incidentally, this is my first sketch in a moleskine sketchbook - as people kept raving about them I thought I'd try one. On the first page I simply tried out scribbles of the ...