Drawing Tuesday - Serpentine

The Serpentine Gallery is showing Tomma Abts in the "new" gallery (till 9 Sept), and in the "old" one is the work of Christo and Jeanne Claude towards the installation in the Serpentine itself, Mastaba, made of thousands of oil drums, resting on or in the water (till 23 September) -

I ignored the barrels and went for the teasels; my teasel wasn't botanically accurate but I did enjoy looking closely and finding ways to "evoke" it -

Bees on a teasel

Teasels on a page

then wandered around the Tomma Abts show, intrigued by the way the pictures were placed within the environment and distracted by how inadvertent aspects of the environment can distract from the work on show - or rather, add a different sort of interest -

We congregated, one after another, in the Pavilion, with its shallow area of water and reflective ceiling -

Ceiling reflection

 Jo's new sketchbook is waiting for "next time" -

 Judith had lucidly rendered Christo's barrels -

The white is a Uniball Signo Gel pen

 ... as had Sue -

 Najlaa was intrigued by the unbuilt Mastaba, in Dubai - 126.8 metres long -

 Carol spent the summer's day making rubbings of leaves from the park and gathering them into a collage -

Leaf rubbing was last week's "homework" - the magnolia leaves I'd used were leathery and very tough, and the shamrock-like leaves were thin and tender -

 but gave good rubbings (8B lumograph pencil)-

 and left their colours pressed into the paper they'd rested on -

 Extra-curricularly, Sue had painted a background and applied letter-like shapes

cut with a scalpel from paper that had been painted blue. On discarding it, she noticed that it could be laid over a background itself -

If you zoom in to the photo, you'll see that the cut-out shapes have a very narrow white strip around them - the white paper that had been painted.