Drawing Tuesday - tools of the trade

The porcelain palette has given me so much pleasure, seeing the colours laid out against the whiteness and feeling its smoothness and stability (it's rather solid). For the drawing, I used the colours that were in the wells, and liked the self-reflexivity of that!  It didn't seem like a good idea to use watercolour for drawing the brushes, and in fact it was a relief to get back to straightforward pencil (and eraser).

From Jo - I was demolishing a cotoneaster which had grown to 8 feet plus and then just died. These were the tools (at different scales) -

From Carol - I had so much fun with today’s topic that I actually used A4 paper! It was so good to get out these little characters and think about when I last used them and for what event and that at one time they were regular ‘tools of my trade’. Now only Sally comes out with me and helps with the difficult questions with Reception children. She has a bell inside her which jangles when she is happy.

Puppets Left to right:-

Basil – the Newshound

Todd – the donkey

Charlie the Parrot who likes jokes and Neville the Dragon – both phonic wizards

Sally – the rather forgetful and menopausal sheep

Joey- the sandwich chef tortoise

Sabastian the snail -  a superhero postman

Bip and Bop – vegetarian alien shipmates.


From Janet K -  A few tools in my collection.

From Sue - A selection of Tools for my upholstery projects - which have been few of late! Here’s my sketch, in pastel.

Hammered home! 

From Joyce - Here are my scissors, in charcoal, inspired by the rather sinister lithographs by Jim Dine.

From Richard - Garden tools, mostly passed down from my father’s mother, I think, so beautifully made and a treat to use. Watercolour with some caran d’ache.

From Judith - Tools are such lovely shapes. Memories of CityLit Drawing 2!

From Najlaa - From my collections of scissors and I am sure I have more

From Ann - My inspiration for "tools" - the ever handy brushes and pencil pot! I enjoyed the elegant shapes of the brushes and pencil.  
The other two images are quick sketches of pen and ink and watercolour sketches of the window ledge in my room.  

From Janet B - I only had time for two 15 minute sketches this morning: my left hand drawn by my right hand and vice versa.

From Mags - a quick sketch of some of my sewing tools ( definitely not to scale ! ) Just noticed that many of them are Japanese  although the humbug pincushion was my  mums and the needlecase a gift for shepherding an elderly couple through Paris . 

From Jackie - A beautiful old hand powered sewing machine.. This has made curtains and a variety of things including recently  a couple of face masks

and more to come! 

From Gill - A very rough drawing. My excuse is that I wanted to be free!

Studio Saturday - woodcut based on weaving

Even the best of the "Korean dolls" prints left several things to be desired:

1. using better paper than the flimsy stuff. It was hard to position.
2. using more congenial colours, rather than what happened to be at hand.
3. getting the registration right ... did the warping contribute to this...
4. using better wood - all the time spent carving, and I'm reluctant to pay out an extra fiver for the wood? False economy!

At least the loosened wood didn't break. I put the board between lots of layers of newspaper and set books on it, then let it dry. It went flat at first, but released from the weight it developed a bit of curvature, so it went into the nipping press for a few days, and I've been getting on with something else.

The new project is based on a weaving by Anni Albers. I was intrigued by how it uses the dark and light threads in the warp and weft to form the pattern, but when it came to draw out that pattern for carving, it cried out for a little creative readjustment -

Instead of using the small board and carving four blocks, I found another bit of carpentry plywood in my stash of offcuts and set to work on that, plunging into doing a reduction print.

Too enthusiastically - that middle 4-block should have been a 2-block, oops! Major readjustment in design was needed!

Nor did I wait to get Decent Wood - the long-desired visit to Intaglio Printmakers for "better" wood and paper happened several days after my "realisations" (above).

This is the difference between the 4mm shina ply (centre) and the 6mm, which costs twice as much -

 Meanwhile cutting on horrid tough splintery suboptimal wood continued...

and eventually the first block was printed, on thin paper (left) and on the new stuff. The difference in colour is alarming, but hey this is still a bit experimental.

 The extreme graininess may be due to too much nori so I then used just dots -

 and the pigment was very dilute -

 Another experiment was to keep diluting the pigment with each print, and at this stage there's not much difference between the first and last of the six prints -

 Or is there? -

I'll be diluting the pigment in the same way for the other layers, and it should make quite a difference when all three layers are printed. Or will it?

Those prints are 20cm square, no border. These have a 1cm border and, using a floating kento, were a lot easier to register -

A little break for a bit of sewing, one morning - lavender bags (using lavender from my garden) and a stuffed dragon (for the grandbaby, who already has a mirror-image dragon) ...

The second layer of "Anni Albers" is  nowbeing cut, amid extreme precautions so as not to get into any mixups this time -

 At the end of the day, just the printed crossbars need cutting away.

 'm regretting using this plywood. See what it's done to my nice little hangi-toh - the toughness has driven the blade down the handle! On the left is the hangi-toh from "the cheap set", a better choice for this wood and I shall continue using it, with frequent sharpening.

Fortunately Tom has been able to pull back the the blade and I'll keep the smaller one for less arduous carving.

Woodblock Wednesday - last class this term

At home I reviewed my circle work and thought ahead to what to do next, then enlarged the "penumbra" of one of the fuzzy circles cut earlier.

In class - printing -

messy edges

Using a mask around the edge, and inking up in two colours

I also used the mask to print the lines in the centre and the fuzzy edges around them, but the registration was ad hoc and very sloppy. The mask should be the exact size of the paper! -

 End of term means we lay out our work and have a look -

 Some close-ups -

 At the start of the class, while we were waiting for blocks and papers to reach the required degree of dampness, we learned a little about bonsai - what a huge topic that is! Also on the table, natural pigments for printing experiments - some are said to need no nori...

I dug out the remaining "binders keepers" - what was intended as a way of carrying around the essential bookbinding tools turns out to be just the right size for woodblock cutting tools -

When I make more, there will be wider slots to accomodate tools with bigger handles.

Woodblock Wednesday

With a new term starting, perhaps it's time for a new project ... quite a few ideas have been sparked (but not developed) -

A parcel has been sitting around for a while -

It's been kinda busy in the microcosm that I think of as My Life, so I waited till a quiet moment to open it -

It contained some tools I had ordered online and I'm wanting to start using them on the New Project, but haven't decided what it will be.

I hope the new tools will help me work more carefully and attentively.