Drawing Tuesday - King's Place

Looking ahead to the Japanese woodblock course next week, and knowing that King's Place has tables at which one can sit and ... draw ... or whatever ... I brought along a book of Japanese woodblock prints by one of my art heroes, Shiko Munakata, thinking to get a feel for how the technique might affect the depiction.

The book is quite old and quite heavy but is full of inspiring things, these among them -

I tried using ink for some birds ... it soaked through the flimsy brown bag (later I added white pastel). I also tried inktense pencil, and on adding water managed to add a huge blog, which soaked right through the flimsy brown bag. Yet another case of inappropriate materials!

 However, drawing the shape gave some inkling not only of how different drawing in is from cutting out, but also of how much easier it is to get dark areas with the one-step process of using ink than with the two-step process of water-soluble pencils.

My next bright idea was to cut out the shapes -

 and then a bit of tracing, which really makes you pay attention to the details of the lines, and again to the difference between delineation with pen or pencil and creating a form with a gouging tool.

 I started using the shapes as stencils and as frottage -

 Hope to develop this further before the course.

In the self-portrait exhibition currently showing, Joyce looked at the different ways painters depicted themselves -

 Judith worked outside, finding a sculpture and an urban landscape -

 Carol was outside, near the canal, until it started raining -

 Janet B was sitting comfortably but said she was out of her comfort zone with the architectural subject - "every time I looked, there were more and more lines" -

 Najlaa found sculptures by John Beck -

 Mags tackled "the big red thing" with biros of different colours -

 Tool of the week - biros of different colours - these are "ink joy" -

 Extracurricular activities

Mags had been making little sketchbooks (from a sheet of A4) and filling them in odd moments -

 and she was also going great guns on her train stitching -

 Carol started a new (larger) sketchbook with an iconic motif -

 Janet B has done a series of drawings of her other hand -