pencil – Page 3 – The Consulting Artist

Warmth

I wanted to experiment further with the abstract ‘river’ patterns I’ve been playing with recently. My intention is to try different colours and materials too. I was curious to see how gold leaf would sit alongside acrylic paint, so I mixed up some reds and yellows and painted them randomly onto a pencil grid I marked out on this canvas board.

Once the paint had dried, I applied some gold leaf to a few of the coloured panels.

Here is a close up and another view with the canvas board titled so you can see the gold leaf more easily.

This painting has been sold in my Etsy shop, and a donation will be made to the Arts Emergency charity from the proceeds.

Update : March 7th 2016. I have received a photograph of the finished piece, safely in its new Californian home. Here it is.

Bookcases

A few days ago I shared a sketch I made during a drawing workshop. The sketch was of a bookcase and was drawn ‘blind’, which is to say that I only looked at the subject while drawing, not at the paper. The drawing was completed using a single line, and as luck would have it – the finished work fits nicely into a postcard sized mount.

I enjoyed drawing this and wanted to play with the shape some more, so I traced the outline onto some card using ink this time instead of pencil. Next I added some watercolour and more ink to the picture before mounting it.

Here they are side by side.

Update : This artwork is now sold.

#DrawTour

This week I visited Cass Art in Islington for a drawing workshop with Jake Spicer. Jake’s a friendly guy and an accomplished artist. He spoke briefly about what he thinks the important basics are to help you draw and in time, draw better. I didn’t take notes at the time and here’s what I recall of his suggestions.

Time : Find some, it doesn’t always have to be a lot, but enough to practice regularly

Subjects : Don’t get hung up on what to draw, choose something and draw it

Materials : Keep a small sketch book and pencil to hand, don’t let the absence of stuff to draw with be the excuse for not drawing

Confidence : Grows with time and practice, and part of the process is about making bad drawings and seeing what you learn from them

We then tried drawing something using a continuous line while looking at the subject all the time, not at the drawing. I found this process really enjoyable – here is a sketch of a bookcase.

I had no way of knowing what the final picture would look like until it was finished and I’m really pleased it ended up being a good size to fit one of my small mounts. I’m tempted to trace the basic shape a few times before adding some small details – I might make another small series of images in a similar way that I recently created Stained Glass.

Jake showed us the basics of how to draw a head in profile before inviting us to find a partner and draw them. I’d never made a life drawing of someone else before…there’s a first time for everything.

I can clearly see areas for improvement and at the same time I am happy with this as a first attempt. I really enjoyed Jake’s class – it helped me realise I need to make more drawings, and the basic process is simpler than I thought.