Drawing Tuesday - Wellcome Collection

The "Play" exhibition started with a display of all 24 of Froebel's Gifts, structured play/learning materials invented by a 19th century early-childhood educator -

Froebel's original set (1837) included six activities

... more complex activities were added later

Beloved toys were in glass cases, including a Stieff bear that had had exploratory surgery to find out why his growler wasn't working, sewn up with red thread. His owner went on to become a vet -

A trio of toys, by Jo

Surgical bear

Pumpie, recently made famous by being restored at the V&A
(programme available till May on the BBC iplayer)

A Lego dog, before the firm made bricks

Joyce focussed on the simple Froebel blocks -

In other parts of the building, Sue tackled the glass model of the Giardia organism -

 Judith spent time with the glass implements in the Henry Wellcome display -

Most of my time was spent looking at the exhibition, which included a charming child's drawing of figures with their shadows, presented as an animation in which the shadows gradually appeared, from the figure down, rather like this -

It drew my interest to the shadows of people watching a video

drawing in the dark

I tend to shy away from human figures so this quick sketch - and the won't-hold-still children in a play area - were a bit of a breakthrough, small as it seems.

Extracurricular activities included life drawing along with "that programme on the telly" (available till early March) -

 ... and Joyce made a Beavers shirt for her grandson's beaver toy -

Drawing Tuesday - Wellcome Collection

Last Tuesday was a very rainy morning so I sat in the cafe for a while to dry off, and got out the pieces of fresh chalk I'd collected from the cliffs at Saltdean during my cat-sitting weekend. While wrapping them in tissue paper  so they wouldn't make a mess in people's bags, I started drawing some of them from various angles, using an indigo inktense pencil -

 and experimenting with using the chalk to smudge (and intensify) the colour ... which led to trying other types of pencil.

 Eventually I went into the Electricity exhibition and mussed about with this'n'that -

The film by Bill Morrison was great - an animation of the physical basis of electric current, and its distribution. See scenes from it here. "In a commissioned film, American artist and filmmaker Bill Morrison used material from the Electricity Council archive at MSI (the Museum of Science and Industry) in Manchester to create a visual journey that explores the production and distribution of electricity and its profound impact on our daily lives. "

Michelle had based one of her drawings on the film - and the other, the sprite, came from a vintage label -

 Jo was intrigued by this early electric motor, the Barlow's wheel (1822; read how it works here) -

 Mags found Edison's first lightbulb -

 Janet K put a lot of nails into this Nkisi figure -

The "round" fish on Najlaa's ancient plate is electric -

 Carol limited herself to using one colour -

 Judith was upstairs drawing the marvellous staircase -

 ... and here it is on its lower level (with an Antony Gormley sculpture nearby)

 Sue found a striking head -

 Extracurricular activities

Janet K has been drawing the nasturtiums on her patio

Carol has been examining and capturing irises

  Coincidentally...

Great minds think alike...

And again, a visual coincidence 

... which gave us another chance to see Mags' "electric" sketchbook

Drawing Tuesday - Wellcome Collection

Arriving early, I used the till receipt for a bracing cup of coffee for a warm-up ... loose marks combining to resemble (somewhat) the vase of gladioli and lilies -

Photos from here and there, some taken in retrospect -

nice place for a little afternoon snooze!

Florence Nightingale's moccasins, worn at Scutari 1850-56

amazing bottles

Statues of deceased twins (Yoruba people, Nigeria) (via)

wooden statue showing childbirth, Angola, 19th century (via)

Janet's rendition of the childbirth figure

Sue's rendition of the deceased twins

Jo's massaging apparatus

Carol's collection includes the giant jellybaby

Joyce's shoes (or rather, Florence N's)

Michelle's contrasting sculptural figures

my marks-becoming-lettering (taken from Mary Kelly's
  Post-Partum Document VI, 1978)

my large drawing, with blunt crayon, based on Ramon y Cajal's microscopic
 ink drawings of delicate neural structures

Michelle brought along some books she's been making out of here prints and other sources

 Returning to the Reading Room after lunch, I'd hoped to see again the book that had fascinated me previously - a facsimile of Mascagni's plates of the lymph system. It had disappeared, but another fascinating facsimile book was available -

How is it that you revisit places and still don't notice so many things? This time, the ink-on-slate drawings held my attention, bot for their almost-xrayness and for the process used to produce them -