A lovely day out with my oldest daughter today, headed off to a picturesque little town which also happened to have both a yarn shop and an art gallery. Bought yarn, enjoyed looking at the art. Had coffee in a ye olde worlde coffee shop.
So today's face has to be my oldest daughter :-)
3rd Feb - A long day with a 3:50am start, a 7 hour ferry journey and an 8 hour drive - arriving at my parent's house at just before 9pm. I am not a good sailor and just have to sit when i'm on board so finding a subject for todays face was a little tricky. Anyway I spotted a poster for a local jewelry company and had a go at drawing the model on there. I have a lot of issues with it but it will have to do for today!
4th Feb - A nice lie in then off to the local mall to get some bits and pieces. wow, so many people, so many cars! I always get culture shock when I leave the peace and quiet of my little island. My youngest daughter Kat came round this afternoon. I love her so much - always laughing, always smiling - she cheers my heart no end :-)
As always I have issues with the sketch - man, why is it so hard to get eyes and spectacles to look right! More practice needed obviously!
Found this fabulous mini article online today on the Artist and Illustrators website - a UK magazine that I buy sometimes - usually when i'm on the mainland and have access to shops! I just don't find it as satisfying to read this type of magazine on my iPad or iPhone.
Very relevant to the 29 Faces challenge that i'm participating in this month :-)
Artists and Illustrators Magazine - how to article - close up study of face
This small tutorial found on crftsy.com looks like it will come in usefull as well:-
And so on to todays face - the man i'm married to - watching football on the internet (and not swearing at this point as the connection has been rubbish all day with a complete two hour outage this afternoon. P.S. He says it is very unflattering and told me i'd drawn in too much hair to start with so I rubbed some out :-)
After finishing the 30 Paintings in 30 Days challenge I didn't think i'd participate in another challenge just yet but found out, via two different sources about the 29 Faces running during February. Can't guarantee i'll do all 29 but have made a brief start...
All my art supplies are packed for the trip to Spain now. Just have to get off the island on Wednesday - i'm currently sitting typing this while the wind is blowing a hoolie outside - gusting up to 71mph so far. I'm amazed I still have electric and internet! :-) The official name of this current storm is Henry - which is kind of weird as my face for today is Harry, whose official name is Henry.
"Harry"
Another warm sunny day but very very windy. We headed into the city centre on the bus and had morning coffee at Cafe Iruña - none of the sun umbrellas were up as the wind was gusting. Explored the shops, bought a lovely dress and chatted, in Spanish with the lady in the dress shop, when we found out that we were from the UK she told us about her sister who had lived in London and had died suddenly earlier this year. Told her we would pray for her sister when we got to Santiago (I'm not particularly religious but J has just qualified as a Deacon).
After wandering the city for a while we went for tapas at Okapi which is located on the "encierro" which is where the bull run takes place at the San Fermin festival in July. I left P and J sitting inside with their tapas and sat outside to sketch. Although I have a "proper" sketchbook with me i've been using my diary - I think I suffer from "blank page syndrome" with the sketchbook!
A little urban sketching
A fabulous sunset from the apartment this evening and a few bats flying around outside. Species unknown.
I travelled up to Lewis on Thursday - crossing the Sound of Harris on the ferry as a foot passenger. The hottest day of the year so far! 28'C Not too much fun on a stuffy bus on a windy road but that's what happens when you cheap out... A 20 minute stop in Tarbert between buses and I decided to go for it and sit and sketch the Tarbert Stores - this was also my homework for Koosje's Week 2 class of Sketchbook Skool. I plonked myself down on the pavement and drew. For my first taste of urban sketching it wasn't too bad at all - I got very few odd looks :-)
Tarbert Stores, Isle of Harris
I'd made a very quick pencil sketch and some notes the night before leaving as we'd had a beautiful sunset at home so during a quiet time later in the evening I committed it to paper.
Sunset, South Uist
Friday and I caught the bus over to Stornoway. The big metropolis. I visited An Lanntair, the arts centre firstly for a much needed coffee and afterwards to visit the latest exhibition called Tumadh: Immersion which was bird related. I'll write a dedicated post to the exhibition as part of my coursework. I must say that it was very different and I enjoyed it very much. Time for some more urban sketching...
An Lanntair, Stornoway, Isle of Lewis
My friend Jane runs the Blue Pig Studio in Carloway and she did a quick workshop on sketchbook making on Saturday afternoon, it was good fun and we swapped lots of ideas.
Mini-sketchbook
I also had my other sketchbook with me and over the few days visit I did an ink drawing a day for the 75 day ink sketch challenge that i'm doing. The rules are no pencil, black or blue ink only and 75 sketches to be completed in 75 days. I chose random objects belonging to my friends.
Fishing reel
A friend's stove
Old Singer sewing machine
Morning coffee
Headed back home on Monday morning - very very midgie and got eaten alive waiting for the bus!
My new Derwent Inktense pencils arrived yesterday but I didn't have time to unpack them. Over breakfast this morning - I'm no use to anyone before coffee - I unpacked them and had a little play.
I had heard good things about the Inktense pencils from friends, easy to use, vibrant colours, easy and clean to travel with. I used a waterbrush to wet the pencil marks after colouring in the squares and the colours were indeed bright and vibrant. My only wish was that I had ordered a bigger box than the 12 crayons! This led me to try mixing the colours on the page before adding the water and that seemed to work out OK. As these are ink pencils, once dry the colours are permanent. They can also be used on fabrics (oops don't get on clothes unintentionally!). While drinking my coffee I drew a shell and added a light touch of Inktense pencil. I told Ian I was doing my morning meditation drawing... I wasn't that happy with the drawing it was the wrong shape so I will return to the same shell in a few weeks and see if my skills have improved - I quite like the idea of re-visiting the same objects and seeing how i've progressed.
Shell
The "Day 4" on the page indicates that this is one of the drawings towards the sketch challenge Brenda set us in this week's Sketchbook Skool, it's "75 Days of Sketching with Pen." The rules are simple do a drawing, in any type of pen every day for 75 days. I just noticed that it says blue or black ink only and I used some brown on this one but I did the outline in black Uni Pin so hopefully that counts. As for drawing technique and subject - anything goes but NO pencil under-drawings! Brenda suggests using a separate sketchbook purely for the challenge sketches. The one I started using (a Derwent one) was pretty awful for anything other than the Uni Pin pens - with fountain pen or dip pen the ink instantly "bleeds" into the paper. I searched around the cupboards and shelves for another sketchbook and found an A5 size Winsor & Newton one that was, so far, unused. I chopped out the three pages that i'd already done and stuck them into the new book. My only problem with the new sketchbook is that the very edges of some of the sheets were stuck together, where it is ring-bound. I think it must have got damp either in storage (in the warehouse not here!) or in transit. Oh, and before I transferred I checked I would have enough pages! Right ho, now I need to go and make myself a schedule of work for the OCA Drawing 1 course as i've heard from my tutor...
One of my interests in life is moths and on dry, relatively wind-free nights I put a moth trap out in the garden. It has a mercury vapour bulb which attracts moths. The trap is lined with egg boxes and the moths go into the trap and roost up under the egg boxes. In the morning I go through the trap and count and identify all the different species. the results go off, at the end of the year, to the local Biological Recording Group and they in turn send them to the National Biodiversity network. Until I became interested in moths I never realised how beautiful some of them are. I sketched the Garden Tiger (Arctia caja) that was in the trap last night.
Garden Tiger
No moths were harmed in the making of this sketch - all the moths are released, un-harmed, back to the wild after being identified and counted :-)
Moth trap at dusk
10pm at night, still light here in the far north west of Scotland. Unusually there is not a breathe of wind and I sit with the window open listening to the natural sounds outside. I started the sketch with a brief wash of watercolour, outlining the shape of the window then started on the detail drawing. Afterwards I added a little watercolour to the items on the windowsill and on the blind.
Window
Mixed media artist and photographer
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