31 August 2021

Drawing Tuesday - portraits

 Reasons for portraits:

- catching a likeness

- showing the outer (or inner) life of the subject

- making a record of important people for posterity


Reasons for self-portraits:

- constant availability of sitter

- a certain fascination with mirrors...?


From Sue B sending a drawing i did last year of a friend’s one-year old grandson, wearing his mum’s hat, from a photo



From Sue K -  Had my annual eye test on Monday & had an awful time trying on specs & taking awful selfies. Here’s the result!



From Joyce - I’ve gone for the easy option and sketched a “portrait “ of some leaves from the garden! 



From Judith - Portraits from photos, Judi Dench looking rather severe




From Gill - Wanted to try out a fine nib dip pen after looking at a Van Gogh portrait drawing.



From me - nothing fresh, despite good intentions.  "Making a cake for daddy" was drawn from a photo in July, and almost immediately revised with tracing part of the image, gluing paper over the bit that was no longer needed, and putting the tracing in place. 


24 August 2021

Drawing Tuesday - five years ago

This drawing group has been going for more than five years, so perhaps it's a good time to revisit those "early drawings" as a starting point, or even to re-draw something that still captures your imagination. (There are various accounts of "redrawing my entire first sketchbook" available on youtube etc - I haven't watched any, the sheer length of most of them is so offputting! - correction: I have now fast-forwarded through some of them, and what is striking is not the increase in skill of execution but the reassessment of what needs changing.)


Another approach to the topic is to look back five years - what was going on in the world, in your life? Photos? Memories? Sort of a "this day in history"...

Drawing of history, drawing as history, take your pick. And on the other hand, some things never change, so if you feel like drawing flowers, go for it!



From Janet KHere's one I made earlier. 5 years ago I spent the summer in Salford working on a kid's TV program, The Furchester Hotel, a co-production between the BBC and Sesame Street. The half star hotel was run by a family of monsters. The set designer cleverly incorporated monster motifs into the set including the brocade wall paper. I did this cross stitch of a wallpaper detail as a present for the line producer.


From Sue Kbefore & after pics of my work in glass fusion @ Mary Ward Centre. Interesting effects with the glue patterns on the ‘before’ pic.



From Ann - These pieces I created during the Edam course at City Lit in 2016. My heart wasn't really in it as my husband was very ill in hospital.  We got through it thank goodness ...NHS were amazing. So we are forever grateful... indeed. 




From Jo - Five years ago I went to the Isle of Man on a tour to look at archaeology. The photos have disappeared - in an IT crisis some years ago - but the memory is of a storm on the return journey. It was actually daytime, and a mere 45 minutes of ploughing through a "front" in the Irish Sea, but this is how I remember it! 


From Judith - Five years ago I was playing around with weaving and there was, of course, that vote.



From Mags - 5 years ago it was my first visit to the Petrie Museum, what a glorious place (http://magsramsay.blogspot.com/2016/08/drawing-tuesday-pots-at-petrie.html), I miss it most of all the museums.


From Janet B - Five years ago this week I was on a quilting retreat in the Lickey Hills to the west of Birmingham where I learnt how to make this simple curved block. I’ve made several quilts using it.



From Gillian - Just looked at my photos taken in Mexico City where I explored for 6 weeks, then spent 2 weeks in Cuba. So glad I had that experience when I could.
I remember spending ages deciding what to buy from this lady.
The challenge for me today was to draw her without using colour!



From Joyce -  here are two barrels drawn at the Museum of  London in Docklands in August 16.


From Najlaa - Five years ago at Margaret house i draw the plate with this lovely bird.



From me - A little over five years ago, 7 June 2016, the drawing group came to "my domestic museum". I chose to draw Tony's "captain's chair", one of two that were equally wobbly and never sat in. Five years later I set out to redraw it, replacing the blanket by some guesswork and carefully straightening up the perspective. The chair on the left was no longer "wonky" but it lost all its joie de vivre! The new chair looked very small and overwhelmed by the space around it (sort of a metaphor for that strange time, alone in the house, I suppose) so I got busy adding research thumbnails off the internet, to fill the page.

 At this point I feel I can draw a captain's chair with my eyes closed. 

17 August 2021

Drawing Tuesday - a poem or a song

This week's topic is anything mentioned in, or brought to mind by, a song or a poem. The sky's the limit!!

I looked on my shelves for illustrated poems and found some illustrations on the covers of the books, applying to the entire contents (perhaps), or at least relevant to the title of the collection.


Inside other books, poems have illustrations, sometimes by the author -




A painting leads the choice of poem in this instagram account -


From Judith -  A sort of story board, no prizes for guessing poem.


From Jo - This was done several years ago: Indian ink, partly collaged. I was interested in poems about encounters with animals in houses. The others (which included bats and lions) were much scrappier even than this! It was a sad poem called Fable by Janos Pilinszky, translated by Ted Hughes.



From  Ann - .looking at past pieces inspired by poetry..
firstly, a photograph taken in the Spring of a Hampstead magnolia...
A little bird poem response 
and a rather sombre Haiku, written by my grandson recently.





From Gillian - Sorry about this one!
Can’t draw cows very well


From Najlaa - This is a poem in Arabic to Iraqi writer called Ahmad Mater. I couldn't find the translation to this one.

From Joyce - a poem written by my sister, Moira Coupe, over which I’ve drawn sea kale. I’ve used Japanese brush pens , my original sketch was done in Aquarelle crayons when we stayed in Swanage together in 2003.


From Sue K - A hommage to Wordsworth - ‘l wandered lonely as a cloud’ .



‘A host of golden daffodils’ a sketch/wash done last Spring when l dead-headed a bunch of daffys & felt compelled to record the assemblage.


From Janet B - Old MacDonald had a box of vintage farm toys which I unearthed while searching for something else. 


From me - Quentin Blake's cover of Roald Dahl's Revolting Rhymes shows, in the pictures on the wall, some of the six traditional tales "reinterpreted" by Dahl - Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk - parodies with surprise endings. 
The wolf's book cover (in Blake's drawing) is an example of infinite regression, aka the recursive Droste Effect.





10 August 2021

Drawing Tuesday - similar/different

 Arguably, a collection - even one as vast as a museum collection - is based on certain similarities in the objects admitted to the collection. Also arguably, it is the differences in these objects that make the collection interesting. 

As an example, consider the big similarities and small differences in the many varieties of willow pattern plates.
 
My collection of animals seems to have more differences (eg size, materials) than similarities; perhaps the only similarity is the theme of "animals" -



From Carol - Charlie the parrot puppet and his little ‘Charlie’ helpers who all helped me teach phonics to Year 1 back in the day. The little Charlies were out for hide and seek games in the garden this week with my grandson. There used to be 20 but some seem to have flown off into little hands over the years.



From Gill - I was given some lovely sun flowers at the weekend. Here’s two of them.



From Ann -  For an online life session last week the same pose...but different!




From Sue K - Two victorian 'light reflectors' - found on a vintage stall, now hung in our window to catch prisms.



From Judith - A trainer is always good to sketch!



From Joyce - Leaves from my garden,inked up with mini ink pads in two shades of green. Some have similar veining and some similar shapes.



From Richard - Similar/ different/negative; very lazy photo submission. Is anyone else staring at these things, thinking there should be some way to reuse them? Rather bad taste, I suppose.



From Mags - Nasturtium flowers gathered for splash of colour on ' Et tu Brut' chicken caeser salad , manipulated in Photoshop





From me - Two plates, one a Wedgewood willow pattern and the other anonymous, but of the same ilk - it has the bridge, the pavilion on the island, different sorts of trees, the boat - but no birds. I started centrally and worked outward, using pen (no eraser). After an intense hour on the traditional plate, I had to lightly pencil in the main areas; after doing that, I could work on the other without any pencil drawing, just "hope for the best".

The bit of loose pencil drawing (barely visible on the left page) made it possible to get back to using just the pen on the right. Even so, I didn't put in all parts from each plate, nor the borders.