Recent geometry

Practising painting (watercolours). Choosing colours can be difficult; currently I seem to be want to use blues, so many different shades...

(Needs a bit of red, I think)

Building up a stock of greetings cards.

Drawing Tuesday - seashells, pebbles, sticks

"Pebbles from Porto", spread out on the table by the window and drawn first thing in the morning. If the sun hadn't happened to come out, those shadows would have been drawn from conjecture rather than observation!

From Richard - I’ve kept it simple, sketching shells we (but mostly Sue) have collected on our travels. Simple pencil outlines to make me plunge into watercolour to loosen up. Both pieces are rather lazy but I did enjoy it a lot. 

From Sue S - I began with an assembly of pebbles l’d combed from beaches. The result felt rather dull, so l & turned to studying a broken shell, purely enjoying shapes & then shadows when the sun popped out.

From Najlaa -

From Sue B - I love shells…and have collected from many locations over the years and have them in an alabaster dish on the side of my bath…the scallop shells are from the isle of Arran…the largest ones are from the beach near Dunbar. 

I have tried for the first time with coloured crayon wash as well as pencil

From Ann - A 'sunburst' collage of shells completed some time ago in Mauritius and two watercolours of large and small shells  just finished.  It was a great joy to look again at my huge shell collection and also to quietly study them.

From Mags - A few characterful stones from my extensive collection. When the Henry Moore exhibition was at Kew Gardens, there was a selection of animal bone, flints, shells, pebbles and driftwood from his studio on display : found objects from the earth, returned to the landscape as sculpture.

I used a limited palette of watercolour: mainly Raw Sienna, Burnt Umber, French Ultramarine with a touch of Alizarin Crimson for the ' holey' one.

From Sylvia - Fragments dug up from gardens with new Schmincke watercolours!

From Janet B - I’ve been following the water colour discussions with interest although I don’t have any water colour paints myself. But then it’s taken me five years to start using coloured pencils so give me time. However a while back my WI had an art session and so here is my one and only water colour (plus 2B) and a chalk sketch. 

From Gillian - Using pencil, crayons and gouache and edited

From Carol - From North Norfolk beaches – shells, gorse sticks and hag stones with holes to keep the witches away! A first attempt by me at using gouache – tricky but I enjoyed it.

From Judith - 40 years ago I polished stones and I have just spent an hour playing with them! Then a very broad interpretation of sticks, bark from neighbourhood trees.

From Joyce - a shell (don’t remember from where) sketched with ink, and a bag made from a previous drawing. One side is free machine embroidery and the other side appliqué with Kaffe Fassett scraps.

From Janet K - A rock and pottery shards found by my kids mud-larking on the shore of the Thames. Pencil and Neocolour - water-soluble wax pastels.

From Jackie - little shells from travels … compulsive collector when at the beach… pen and crayon

From Jo - "Flintfoot" - collage of a sculpture made by me from a flint pebble with a hole in and a random hedge-cutting found c.50 years ago

 "Titanic" - sculpture made by me a few months ago: flint pebble, driftwooed (cleat from a boat?) and random hedge-clipping

Woodblock Wednesday - finally, a consortium of octopuses

Second layer on these -

 ... for a grand total of nine -

 ... and these, either finished or just the one layer printed, belatedly -

Deciding what colour to use for each took quite a while. I wrote the colour on the back of the print and put them in the damp pack.

The block had been cut back to make little holes in the suckers. Printing went smoothly. These are on paper from a hosho pad -

 and these are on other papers, which take the "ink" much better -

 The eyes were carefully tipped in as a separate layer -

I hope you can see the effect for the little holes in the suckers.

Done and dusted? Maybe. So, on to the next....

During the week I remembered seeing a print ... somewhere ... with narrow areas of colours around the edge of a circle, white (unprinted) interior and black (ink?) background, or perhaps foreground. I wondered if the layers of colour (from overprinting the colour blocks) would make a dark enough background, or if a layer of black would be needed.

 Experiments -

 Overlap (a slightly Turneresque quality?) -

To be continued...