I'm preparing to go into the Lake District again and try sketching with charcoal instead of watercolours. Limiting myself to just figuring out composition and tonal values will be good practice for me! The forecast is clouds, sunshine and rain so there should be some dramatic lighting for the day as the sun comes out and it's something the Lake District captures really nicely!
My main concern is that I rarely use charcoal as a medium and I tend to over to it and get muddy values as I try to building up textures…
So as it's the night before, I'm going to get some practice in and then just give it a go tomorrow. The worst case scenario is I don't like my pictures but it'll still be a good learning experience! Plus, messy techniques are always really satisfying!!

I used charcoal pencils, a range of rubbers and some blue pastel for these sketches. I also put a wash on a couple of pieces of cartridge paper and tried a few scenes on them which worked nice but I found it kill some of the highlights that would have made the pictures come alive.

Derwentwater plein air – First attempts

September 8, 2017Leave a comment

I've mentioned before that I recently moved to Cumbria in England. This has given my spirit an excellence burst of inspiration and energy and has allowed some of my creativity to come out. I'm still making lots of colour charts ( I'll show you my most recent one in another post shortly!) but I'm also getting outdoors while the weather permits and doing some sketching with watercolours.
I visited Derwentwater recently ( home to the Derwent sketching pencils, I did visit the museum and their shop but I didn't buy more pencils…I have to use the ones I've got already before I allow myself to buy even more!) and here are some of the sketches I managed on the day. I'm really pleased with the day's outcome and felt that I've taken a solid step forward to where I want to be as an artist with this.

This is the palette I put together for my outing

Lemon yellow
Cadmium yellow
Yellow ochre
Burnt sienna
Van Dyke Brown
French Ultramarine
Cerulean
Quinacridone magenta
Cadmium red
Sap green
Hookers green light
Payne grey
Ivory black

I felt that I mainly ended up using lemon yellow and yellow ochre mixed with all the combinations of the blues and greens to figure out the greens. Payne grey was my favourite for the clouds and water with cerulean for the sky. Having the readymade brown was handy to have, since I was using a very small mixing tray. I tested the colbalt turquoise but felt that cerulean and the Ultramarine were enough of a range for the palette

This is the colour range that I got from the set, I wanted a big range of greens from earthy to lush but not too many blue-greens as I know that I would mainly be trying to capture the forests and shrub land on the mountains. Very limited purples too which was fine as the heather isn't out yet. I also totally stopped round say greens name when I was labelling, oops!

On to the sketches! I warmed up with some pencil sketches before just sloshing paint about for the rest of the day.

I feel that I need more practice with my tonal values and compositions as I set up my sketches but I'm still really pleased with these ones and happy to share them with you all. If you've visited Derwentwater and did any sketches, post a like in the comments so I can see your stuff!

Getting out there

August 17, 2017Leave a comment

Turns out that working with Charcoal on large pieces of paper makes a lot of mess, which can be frowned upon when living with others.

So, my experiments didn’t last long but it was still good get my hand moving again and once I have a studio space set up again, I will continue my experimental mark making. In the meantime I have been getting out for walks in the Lake District and Northumberland.

I have included just a few sketches here. I mainly fell back to take photos as I explored new areas which was a lot quicker as I walked and gawped at things but didn’t help my practice that much. Plus my cameras pretty naff so the photos never do it justice.

Still I have managed a few blobby paintings as my first shaky steps back into things.

Deep breath. Drawing again.

April 16, 2017August 17, 2017Leave a comment

As I breathe deeply, I can smell the clear Cumbrian air.

It’s been’s perhaps 6 months or even longer since I sat down to explore drawing. I have moved and feel inspired to try again to recapture my creative practice. I am going to work through ‘ Drawing space, form and expression’ by Wayne Enstice to get my hand moving again. There’s a lot of good grounding for the practice to take root in again and help grow my skills to where they used to be.

I will be documenting my experiments on this site under the appropriately titled page ‘Experiments’.

To begin, I will be exploring the basics of mark-making and the tensions they create within the picture frame. I’ll be using charcoal to begin with as it’s easy to vary the tone and texture, allowing me to freely play and explore.

I’m taking inspiration from the following artists:

Gerhard Richter
Claude Monets drawing
Georges Seurat
Norman Ackroyd

Illustrators:

Starting Running

December 3, 2016Leave a comment

It is a crisp cold day outside and i’ve delayered myself into a hoodie and running trousers to get out there and run. Everyone I pass has layers and wooly hats and gloves and i’m bizzarely happy that I look so different. I see the smiles that play on their faces, wondering that someones actually going running in the cold like this and I remember my own thoughts when I saw people doing what i’m planning, something along the lines of “I could never do that!”

I met up with my friend and we managed a simple run around the park. I want to share this with you readers, as I want to explore it in more detail; namely the ways how it helps other aspects of my life like the drawing and mindfulness i’m trying to cultivate into my routine.

I’ve read before that many runners go into a meditative state, where they’re only mindful of their run and their body. It’s just them and the road. It always reminded me of the artist, it’s just them and their canvas. Both have to focus their mind and energies into achieving something that takes skill, patience, and focus.

As we start to run and my lungs begin to feel uncomfortable, it feels the same as when I get to the first stage of drawing when i’m not sure what to do next. It’s an uncomfortable tight feeling for me and my instinct is to stop what i’m doing to releave it. When you’re running, your mind has to stay focused to keep yourself moving, to look at the bigger picture and see that this will pass, you will get to the next stage which becomes easier once you’re warmed up. Breath, move, don’t over think things. Breath some more. Keep your focus. Keep your running pattern going. Breath.

For me, the artists actions would be something like breath, relax your thoughts, step back and look, breath and close your eyes, breath and take a look, breath and make a mark, breath and carry that mark forward, breath and look again. For me it doesn’t have to be a flurry of movement and energy although that is fun as well if you’re not feeling stuck and inspiration is racing through you. Trying to stay focused and allow your minds instinct to have the room to direct your vision and marks is something i’m struggling with allowing myself at the moment. I will continue to try different techniques to help quieten my over-thinking when i’m creating. I’ll keep you all posted with how it goes!

Trying to learn Mindfulness: My beginning

November 21, 2016Leave a comment

Stop the bandwagon, I want to get on!

One of the reasons I wanted to start this blog was I needed a space to record what I was doing. I am increasingly aware that what I enjoy the most about drawing, is the way it lets me experience my own life in a more focused way; really looking at my surroundings, ways of responding to what I see and feel and a way to capture my feelings. For a long long time I have been bogged down by getting it perfect. If I’m doing a life drawing, it has to be exact. I have to capture everything in front of my exactly as I see it or it’s a failure. The pressure of being this perfect has caused me to not want to even start. I know that art is a process, the final images is built up of layers the artist creates through many different decisions, following what their own instinct/ experience is guiding them to choose as they go through their process. I KNOW this and yet…my mind cannot start for fear of being lost and getting it ‘wrong’.

I like to go onto a location and sketch what’s around me and I like to go off script when I do manage it, adding my own imaginative details, making it my own. I don’t make time for this often, it’s a habit I’ve been trying to cultivate for years but my comfort zone doesn’t seem to extend into this area and the habits never stick. It’s so much easier to just snap a photo right? Right, which is why I have a ridiculous amount of photos I have rarely used to draw from.

I have to change. Which is where mindfulness comes into play. I’ve been looking into it for a while, and by looking into I mean reading random posts in pinterest…I read the book ‘Flow’ by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi which seemed to cover some principles of it, looking at how our lives are shaped by where our attention is focused. I signed up to a free online course in Mindfulness and got to week 4 before I stopped making time for it and just gently let my hand fall open and allowed it to drift away from me.

So frustrating!

What I want to achieve is to be more aware of when and where my attention drifts, to change my attitude and achieve some more self-management so I can finally achieve those goals I’ve been setting myself. To stop over thinking and analysing everything that passes through my mind. The fear of change I think is one of life’s biggest stumbling block and boy, does it have a hold of me! I’m so comfy just talking about my want of change, sitting at the beginning before the possibility of getting it ‘wrong’ can come to pass. How do I change from being comfortable to being actively curious enough to move? In my head I have decided that NOW is the time I will do it. I go to sleep, I get up and hey presto, my mind wanders away from the uncomfortable and into my same old routine. Any thoughts that do surface get squished into the ‘to do’ list for tomorrow. Tbh, that’s a pretty long list at the minute…

Now don’t get me wrong, I know I have some very good company with me right now, many people have this dilemma and come to the same response as me. It’s why we put up with the boring jobs because we all know that ‘someday soon’ we won’t be there, we’ll be pursuing our dream of ‘whatevertheheckiwasputonthisplanetfor’ and finally our real lives will start…Ugh, it’s so sad to see it in writing because the answer is so obvious. Someday never comes if you don’t move on from what you’re doing today and do something different.

I want some day now. I want to travel and explore the world with my creative practice and share this with everyone and make people’s lives better but I have to start with me. The me right now is standing on page one of the book she wants to write with a whole wheelbarrow full of tools she’s been hoarding but never using.

I had this thought the other day when walking to my work…” If I don’t do it, it won’t exist for me.” If I don’t change my routine, it will never be full of the new things I want to exist in my world. I will never experience them. I will never ever have them. Not a one.

Mindfulness is one of these things. Chapter One: Learn to be Mindful…How do I do this again?

I’m starting with the book ‘Wherever you go there you are.’ by Jon Kabat-Zinn (it was the first one that looked interesting in my library). I need to get some starting pointers and i can’t get it all from pinterest. I also want to follow some blogs that talk about Mindfulness so if anyone that manages to get to the end of this blog post (I realise it’s quite lengthy right now) has any recommendations, please fire away in the comments section below!

Phew, I needed to get that out there! I hopefully won’t emotionally rant too much on this blog but if anyone is feeling the same as me right now, it would be a real comfort to hear from you in the comments section!

Explore: Visiting the multi faith centre

November 21, 2016November 21, 2016Leave a comment

My thoughts before the visit… It’s Wednesday and I’m pretty tired from work and its politics and processes. A chance email alerted me to the opportunity to visit the Multi-faith centre at the local University to watch ‘In the footsteps of Francis and the Sultan‘ a story from the crusade war about a Christian Monk and a Muslim Sultan accepting each other’s faith.

My current routine doesn’t have many links to religion, I don’t practice a particular faith but I was curious about what the story was and how it would be presented. I like random, serendipitous events but I think you have to accept the nudge when it happens to experience them. This week has been a hard one, the past months have been difficult in the world. Faith in politics is feeling thin to a lot of people right now. I’m watching from my new spot in the blog world and seeing other bloggers upset and confused about where to go now with Trump as president. He’s not my president, it’s not my country but I feel an echo of their horror and helplessness. The world feels overwhelming and terribly small at the same time, with these massive changes taking place and yet my life continues with its usual routine.

It was on a whim that I decided to go to a film that looked at harmony between different viewpoints instead of the fight between them.

So, I get changed and eat a quick dinner before heading out to the Centre. I hope to meet interesting, insightful people, be uplifted by the film and find something to share relating to this current world situation. A way through the confusion or at least some happier thoughts. Selfishly, I also want to find a story from this event that I could create into a comic strip to practice my skills. Finding inspiration from real life events causes the stories and feelings to be richer and more relatable than something I try to concoct just in my head.

The dark grey of winter is already pressing in and I hurry through the cold night, feeling excited to break my routine a little.

After the event…

So, you know when you make a decision and it just rings true? You feel super happy, you make connections with people that are the same as you, there’s just a great positive vibe around everything involved..?

So I turn up at the centre and there’s a sign on the door saying there’s a Board meeting taking place. Bit intimidating but there’s a reception and leaflets and anyone’s allowed to go and look at leaflets right? So I wander over and get my bearings and a friendly voice asks me if I’m ok and my standard response of “Yes, thankyou, I’m fine.” just jumps automatically out of my mouth. I’m clearly feeling awkward as I’m staring at some leaflets, late at night, in a multi-faith centre…damn automatic politeness!

Anyway, I manage to walk my body into the room and there’s bookcases (instantly puts me at ease), 2 tables full of cake and a big water kettle for tea. Friendly faces welcome me in and I find a seat with them. It’s not as busy as I expected and we’re watching it on a pull up screen and projector but I like it. It’s not intimidating and I happily chat with the people there as we take tea and cake. I later learn that one of the cakes is made by someone’s 4 year old granddaughter. It all feels very human.

We watch the film with a break in the middle for a refresher of more tea and cake (priorities). I don’t watch many religious documentaries, as I can’t get away from the feeling of propaganda with them, but it was interesting to learn about the different history. How over the generations the stories have changed and how images have warped peoples view of it, depending upon their historical context. The core of the story was that each man saw the complete faith the other had in their own religion and understood they could not change to follow their own. Instead they looked for the similarities the religions had with each other and built on these, taking the good ideas they saw and bringing them into their own faith.

I watched it and kinda thought “well d’uh, that’s how problem solving work to get progress”. I get the feeling that with feelings of faith and religion, people don’t like progress. Change means becoming something different and what most people want is for others to be more like them, without them changing to be more like the other. Once you’ve changed by adding something new to your faith, you’re no longer part of the community that hasn’t moved along with you. You become an outsider from your own faith and that is a scary place to find yourself. Apparently Francis didn’t care though, which is why he still has a strong following going through the world and is considered a friendly badass (well, the film certainly showed him as such anyway.)

After the film we had an interesting discussion about the history of the crusades (there were 5 wars apparently…I really suck at history…) from a religious historian and about the difficulties communities are facing in the current climate of change and peoples response to it. This discussion was interesting as we had a range of faith backgrounds and levels of knowledge (from the University Chaplain to mindfulness workshop leader to a random illustrator). It would have been nicer to have had the opportunity for more Muslim input but we were a group of 8 and the majority were Christians.

One of the key ideas from the discussion that I thought summed it nicely, was that people are valuable as they are. The idea that people’s own faith and experience is valuable and needs to be respected by others. That it doesn’t need to be changed and treated like something sub-human and so not worthy of human rights if it’s not the same at your own. Fear of change is a powerful motivator to destroy anything that looks to rock your life’s status quo; but progress is only really achieved when people step outside their rational thoughts that have been formed by their current ideas and accept a few new ones. It’s rational to be scared of the new and the unknown, especially when the news outlets are making it appear like there’s no other choice. It’s irrational to welcome with open arms something that everyone has labelled as different and scary, when you don’t know what to expect from it.

I just googled the definition of ‘irrational’ to ensure this was the correct word to use here (I had Inigo Montoya’s voice in my head whispering ” You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”) and the definition I got was the following “without or deprived of normal mental clarity or sound judgment.” Sounds about right to me. If you base your judgement on Facebook news or scaremongering tactics of the tabloids though, it’s not a sound judgement.

The best way to make a rational judgement is to go out and explore the new for yourself and make up your own mind from the experiences you have. You may not like it, it may confirm everything you were scared of, but you are making the judgement. Not the press. And that is so important when you are figuring out somethings value and how you want to act.

Walk Draw Explore

Category: Explore

Good morning 2018

Preparing to go charcoal location sketching