paintings prints and stuff

What to do while the paint dries .....  rapid sketches of students and/or fellow painters :>)   ( and some older ones:)

 Playing on the iphone, very fast coloured pencil sketch A quick sketch of my youngest grandson, constantly moving, playing with an iphone.  He disappeared to the play area of the cafe before I drew his arms.  Done with 2 brown coloured pencils  in a small Derwent journal.  (2 because he insisted on having the first one to do some drawing himself, so I had to find another). Drawing active children is so difficult! they just moved constantly.   The 2 below of my slightly older grandchildren were very messy!  I attempted to catch the huge brown eyes of elder grandson and the mop of fair hair my grandaughter was trying to see through to draw and the soft curls of the 2 boys. Below the oldest ones who were so wriggly and active that the drawings aren't successful - more practice needed obviously .... constantly looking up to talk to me, brushing her hair off her face, leaning forward to draw with hair entirely covering her face etc etc...

a mother post-chemo and virtually bald, a lovely close family unit with her daughters  Very quick sketches of fidgeting, moving people in a waiting room.  Not great, but better than being bored : >)  and good practice.  Done with a Pentel brush pen in a tiny 5x4 inch sketch book that I've had for years and never finished off as I don't like working so small.   Working with the brush pen allows no corrections or erasing so here they are errrors and overworking-to-correct and all.   I do like the ability to use it to scrub in areas of tone to work with the more linear marks,   waiting alone, stoic and quiet with burka and skull cap, anxiously waiting

 Lots of hospital in my life at the moment so drawing and painting has slowed down a bit.

Sketches in a waiting room The elderly Sikh gentleman was fated never to be finished - first my brush pen ran out of ink, then they moved him before I finished the carbon pencil sketch.   He remains wheel-less in his wheelchair.  All in a little 6 x4 inch sketchbook.  Smaller than I like, but unobtrusive in this situation. The top right hand sketch is the only one I was anything like pleased with.

More quick sketches of moving people - moving far too much! These two were done with a Rotring art pen and a a little water to smudge and create areas of tone. They are in a moleskine sketchbook - hence the bubbly effect on the washes, which were rubbed into the paper - the waxy paper moleskines don't like water much! and the next 2 with a mechanical pencil with a B lead They were all absorbed in what they were doing and moving a LOT, not making life easy! but it was good practice even if the results aren't great :>)

The latest life drawing - it will not photograph well for me - there is a soft cream in the highlights but they are reading too garishly :>( Done with willow charcoal, compressed charcoal and cream pastel. Again about 90 minutes work, I wanted to concentrate on the 'portrait' aspect with this one. Charcoal is such a lovely medium to work with, messy but so adjustable. I can sweep mistakes away with a brush of my hand (yes I do get very grubby) and redraw, draw back in with an eraser to paint lights back in and be really flexible. I edit. A Lot. We've got the same model, Lucy, very chatty, again next week, with the same pose for those who paint and work slower. So I'll choose another view.

Kerry, A3, Charcoal and compressed charcoal, 90 minute study The first life drawing in years . I worked in charcoal because it's so fluid and a brush of the hand erases and allows you to move elements around, lay down blocks of tone and push-pull until it's something like. It's done on grey pastel paper. I could have used white - or better cream, which I didn't have with me - for the highlights but decided not to. Next time I may work on a warm cream paper. It's a drop in session and I'm definitely going again. Life drawing is such good practice for observation. There's no hiding anything lazy or wrong. There's definite room for improvement but practice practice practice ......

pub terrace in Runswick Bay, watersoluble ink Sometimes, when sketching landscape, people catch my interest and in the midst of something else I'll draw them. These are a random selection from various sketchbooks. All very very fast attempts to catch people moving, absorbed in what they are doing. That interests me more than doing a posed portrait. At the National Gallery , biro and Lyra pencils I worked in biro watching the crowds and added the colour later at home, keeping to a limited palette of warm and cool browns. They were absorbed in looking at the paintings, some wearing the headphones with commentary, one little old lady in an obviously very expensive suit with incredibly wide padded shoulders from the '80s. Ros at Hartshill Hayes and passing dog walkers , pencil Ros sketching along the canal , Wolff carbon pencil Glen sketching , coloured pencil Sue and Pauline on the beach - evening, getting cold, windy , water soluble ink smudged with fingers Here 3 of ...

Quick sketch - artists demo , pen and pencil on handout leaflet I haven't done any more work on the project - work and life haven't left me the time - hopefully this weekend I'll be able to carry on with the paintings in progress. This is just a quick sketch done to alleviate boredom at a demo by a local artist - I had to borrow a pen from a friend and scribbled it on a handout. It was errrmmm ...... like ..... watching paint dry? It's the silhouette of the camera that shows the action on the large screen behind the head on the right, the projector is on the left. The light on the easel dissolved in blinding light so that you couldn't make it out clearly and it created a pool of light around the figure, everything else dissolving into the semi-darkness. I like the way things dissolve into each other in low light - Caravaggio like. I've decided to make sure I have my sketchbook always with me in future.

A modern pre-Raphaelite, digital image, Vivien Blackburn This is a digital image I created quite a while back. I did a series of photographs of my eldest daughter and her belongings in order to do a project, manipulating the images and bringing out aspects of her character. (she does have this habit of running her fingers through her hair like this!) This one was based on a photograph of her, combined with part of a pre-Raphaelite painting - I think by Dante Gabriel Rosetti of Lizzie Siddall (sp?). There is currently as series about the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood so I thought the timing would be good to show it now! There was no painting or drawing involved in this series - just photography and manipulation in photoshop. I'll show the others in the series in later posts. What I wanted to ask was - has anyone used a programme called Allwaysync ? I've downloaded it but not yet had the time to try it out. A fellow tutor, who teaches IT, highly recommended it for sync-ing...

An update on the FPP sketchbook exchange - I now have Casey's book :>) as Glen finished her section in record time! ..... no pressure then :>0 Casey started her book - theme Local Colour - with some lovely colourful sketches of people and market fruits, a real flavour of France :>) There is a beautiful fresh fluidity and freedom in the way she catches these and it's great to have them here to see in real life. and Nina carried on with some beautiful observations of people in Stockholm, chatting, relaxing ... Again such a strong use of pen, so assured, and then lovely loose floods of watercolour. Lovely glimpses of local colour - and then this great landscape Glen followed on strongly with watersoluble pens and a sketch of the flower shop opposite her fish shop with busy shoppers and buckets of flowers. and I have to follow all this ! and Nina's book will be in the post to Ronell this week as I've virtually finished my pages :>) with a total change of pace fr...

Ros, June 08, sketching along the canal at Aylestone. conte pencil. Vivien Blackburn On Monday I went sketching along the canal at Aylestone with Ros - sketch of her above, working hard. It was lovely to be out and a friendly little robin shared our lunches and spent the afternoon virtually on our feet and perched on the bench I was sitting on :>) .... and of course I didn't have my camera. It was a lovely warm, still afternoon and everything was lush and green. Along the bank in front of us the seed heads on the grasses were a pinky mauve colour and there were white clover flowers. We were near a lock and boats occasionally arrived to tie up while they operated the lock gates and went on their way and occasional walkers passed by. The robin stayed throughout :>) The canal at Aylestone, the curves and ridges of medieval strip farming are still visible in the field on the other side. Plein air Pencil sketch. Vivien Blackburn This was the first sketch I did us...

drawing hands in charcoal - over life size, A1 paper - also featuring my lovely plan chest! This shows part of my plan chest - the large sheet of paper - A1 - is lost in the large shallow drawers, they take huge A0 sheets :>) A1 is the size of 8 sheets of typing paper side by side. One of the fun things of starting to load work into the plan chest was in unrolling old drawings and finding stuff from the degree and pre-degree - not seen in years! This one was a uni challenge to draw our hands - here revealed are my horrible chubby paws :>o - We had to draw our left hand with our right and vice versa. Any guesses as to whether I'm right or left handed? a much older pastel drawing I came across - about 2ft 6in tall -ish. This was done at a weekend workshop. It doesn't show up well in the photo but that really does look like velvet on the seat in real life. It brought back happy memories of a friend who died last year and the fun we had on the course. Feathers an...

Sketch: Baby Sam in his wetsuit, ready for swimming, mechanical pencil in moleskine, Vivien Blackburn A sketch of Sam from a photo my daughter emailed. She had bought this little wetsuit so he can go swimming, he was trying it on and he looked so delighted with it. Those chubby, bendy little legs were funny to draw :>D The computer problems are hopefully solved - it took the online analyst (who was lovely) 3 hours though! lets hope the protection it gives is worth it. It's currently backing up my files for me and is taking forever - but I do have a zillion image files. I've just changed the banner - what do you think? .

Sam, 5 months old. Pencil sketch. Vivien Blackburn Drawing babies isn't the easiest thing to do - but now Sam is developing a distinct character and personality of his own it's getting easier. This is in my moleskine sketchbook - I do wish they would make a larger size of these because I like them for drawing in but even this 'large' size is in fact small. He was absolutely delighted with this stuffed toy that jingled and made noises and he's very sociable, loving the interaction with those around him. He has very dark eyes. It made a change from the beaches :>) .

Across the beach, late afternoon, cool day, charcoal and coloured pencil, 18 ins sq. Vivien Blackburn Another experiment with the charcoal and coloured pencil combination on grey paper - this time I did something I rarely do and included figures and a dog - it helps give the scale of those cliffs and rocks - the figures should actually be slightly smaller but the pencils wouldn't cooperate any smaller than this :>) Done using willow charcoal, polychromos and Lyra coloured pencils and a battery operated eraser on grey rough paper (which eats the pencils). The curve in the horizon is the paper not lying flat - not me tipping the sea up! detail enlarged - on the drawing this is less than half an inch high the figures are just very loosely suggested, with their dog playing in the water. detail from dark reflection - there are lots of hazy subtle colour changes in these that don't show up well onscreen :>( I ended up working all day and evening yesterday, covering for ano...