2023 daily drawings

I inherited a beautiful set of inktense pencils last year... I wasn’t entirely sure how to use them. So I’ve set myself a new daily drawing challenge for this year - learning to use the pencils with a new theme each month.

Feeding my inner colour geek. Before I started, I made a record of all the colours in my sketchbook - how they look dry, dipped in water and with water added. This looks like a laborious task but I absolutely loved it. It’s proved to be really useful - at first glance many of the pencil colours look the same, so this catalogue makes it really easy to make a quick selection to get started on a drawing.

In January I started with vintage vases... a bit of a mixed bag, but I’ve already learnt a lot about how the pencils work (water soluble then waterproof when dry)...

February was faces. Way out of my comfort zone here… I’m much more at home with plants and animals. They are a bit hit and miss, but I’ve learnt about how  to get more subtle shades of colour, building it up in layers. Nostrils and various skin tones are a work in progress though. I enjoyed seeing characters emerging each day, and I am starting to appreciate the potential of the pencils…

Ghosts in the Machine

Rather belatedly, but better late than never... I’m thrilled to be part of the United Artists’ World Book Night publication ‘Ghosts in the Machine’ launched last weekend at BABE 2022. An ethereal - and bumper - collection of monochrome images creating a bibliography of all participants’ favourite ghost stories. I chose Daphne du Maurier’s ‘Rebecca’. There’s a wonderful exhibition of all the prints at Bower Ashton Library until 29 June and you can view a short film of the project at https://youtu.be/5cHj5NQvh2c

Many thanks to Linda Parr (@lsp_books) and Sarah Bodman for organising this excellent annual collaborative project - it’s always a joy to take part...

Week thirty nine

Back from holiday, and a quiet-ish week on the Garden Residency front as I catch up with work.

I completed my daily drawings for September - using gouache this month. It’s felt more of an exercise in colour mixing than in observation, but hopefully it captures some of the late-summer colour in various gardens this month (my own in Bristol, my parent’s in Shropshire and my holiday in Norfolk).

I had fun trying out my new set of brush pens with a drawing of cosmos and asters in the front garden... lovely bright colours in what was been a grey, rainy week. Definitely picked the right week for my holiday!

Inspired by the seedheads of hollyhocks in the garden where I’ve been staying in Norfolk, I carved and printed a new rubber stamp repeat pattern. I think this could work on both paper and fabric – I’m interested to scale it up a bit, and also to introduce some colour.

Week twenty eight

Mark making with new Chinese brushes

Dye batch from a large Cordyline flower

A week of mark making and a little bit of dyeing. I’ve been experimenting with using some new Chinese brushes - quick sketches in the veg patch and also a drawing of a tree peony leaf. I also tried a new approach for monoprinting… painting black oil paint onto a piece of paper and then drawing on the back of the sheet as a transfer. Much quicker than inking up a perspex sheet, and I like the marks of the brushstrokes that are transferred to the printed drawing. I made some prints into a concertina book, but it’s just a prototype as the paper was a little thin and cockled when glued together.

My latest dye experiment was with a large Cordyline flower from the garden, which I chopped up as soon as it had finished flowering. I had high hopes as a lot of colour was immediately extracted when I covered it with boiling water, but the end results are a little bit underwhelming… some nice buttery colours on protein fibres, but on the cotton and linen there was very little colour at all. It does however win the coveted title of stinkiest dye bath so far… definitely one for boiling outside, and a heady whiff of men’s urinals drifted across the gardens of Coombe Dingle when this was on the hob!

Week two

Samples of homemade ink (some more successful than others)

Pattern play with a rubber stamp carved from an ink drawing of periwinkle leaves

Quick ink sketches of rare splashes of colour in the garden at the moment

Red cabbage dye experiments - purple fades to lovely blues and teals

A grey and dreary week here in the UK, but I’ve busied myself making new batches of colour – both for dyeing fabric, thread and yarn, and making ink. I’ve had a few false starts with the ink making – pans boiling dry, or the colour being too weak or crystallising, but I finally seem to be getting the hang of it. Fun to see them all together on a sample sheet… what felt like a lot of non-descript browns have more subtlety than I realised at first glance. I enjoyed making a pattern stamp based on one of my daily ink silhouette drawings, and I’d like to develop this further and start to print onto some of my dyed fabric. It’s been great having the garden as a focus for my artwork to create a welcome distraction from all the depressing headlines at the moment, and of course to make the most of staying at home.

New year, new challenge

First drawings using ink I’ve made from acorn galls of a skeleton poppy head from my front garden...

Happy new year!

Inspired by increased time spent outside growing things over the past year, and also the fact that we’ll clearly be based at home for a good while yet, I’ve invented a ‘virtual residency’ for myself in my garden for 2021.

My aim is to give myself a clear focus for creating new work over the next 12 months, but with an emphasis on learning and developing new techniques and processes.

I’m hoping it will evolve as I go along, and it will need to fit in with working full-time, but I’m looking forward to investigating the inspiration outside my back door a lot more closely.

First (made up) rule of the garden residency - draw more. Second rule - try to use more natural materials in my work.

Festive greetings

Finishing work, online shop closed and I’m finally getting ready for a festive two week break - hurray! It may feel quite different this year, but I hope you have a very happy Christmas wherever you are…

Word binding

Finally found time to create my illustration for the Word Binding book for ABC at UWE to illustrate the poem written by Beth Claverley (@poetrymachine on Instagram) at a zoom workshop back in April. All participants were allocated a few lines to illustrate. I was given:

It’s important, somehow,
that these thoughts aren’t picked
but found, pressed to the ground.
Moments that others might just walk past.

I decided to keep it simple, and incorporate some typewritten words from the poem as a nod to the orginal way it was written… I used rubber stamp, image transfer and typewritten collage. I look forward to seeing all of the other illustrations brought together into a book. The sketch shown above was done during the zoom workshop.

I got up...

I got up at 5.02am in Coombe Dingle in Bristol. My contribution to the MiniBABE collaborative tribute to On Kawara. People all over the world document the time and place they got up on thursday 7 May. If it wasn’t for Lockdown, this would have been my first morning waking up in Sweden, but it’s still a lovely start to the morning sat on my balcony (before most sensible people wake up). Suffice it to say, I am a lark rather than an owl! More info on the project at arnolfini.org.uk or look on Instagram and Twitter for #igotuparnolfini

A cheery new project

Glaucous macaw

Javan lapwing

The first couple of illustrations (on the left) were a bit patchy, so I re-did them in a simpler style and feel much happier with how they turned out. On the top is a Po’o-uli and on the right is a New Calendonian Lorikeet.

Building up shapes gradually in layers with hand carved stamps

This one has been percolating in the back of my mind for a while now. I read a story in the Guardian over a year ago about a report published by Birdlife International that identified species that were at risk. As part of this report was the news that eight birds have already been declared extinct this century. I’ve done some research into these eight birds and decided I would like to illustrate them as a record of what has been lost. My initial idea was to use collage, but I was distracted back to my favourite medium of rubber stamps. My first attempts were a bit patchy, but then I started to get into my stride using a new technique of building up semi-transparent layers of colour, and wiping the stamps to set a softer, more painterly style. This is very much work in progress, but I’ve enjoyed the process of closely examining the birds to create the illustrations and to work in a slightly different way with stamps.

Season's greetings!

A very busy year is finally drawing to a natural conclusion - looking forward to two weeks off with no deadlines to meet. This year’s Christmas card was based on a rubbing of a paper snowflake - all the fun of printmaking without the stress of waiting for the ink to dry! Wishing you a very happy Christmas and all the very best for 2020.

And finally – Z is for...

Zebralagen, a Swedish word meaning the law that vehicles must stop for people at pedestrian crossings. The final rubber stamp illustration for my Anglo-Swedish exchange of words with Eva Hejdstrom. 26 illustrations over 33 months - I feel both elated and a little bit sad to have finally reached the end of the alphabet. I like the fact that both of our final illustrations aptly contain the word ‘stop’. Although we have plans to make a limited edition book to document the collaboration, so I’m pleased to say it’s not quite over yet...

Y is for...

yahoo (exclamation mark optional) meaning expressing great joy or excitement. Penultimate rubber stamp illustration for my Anglo-Swedish exchange of words collaboration with Eva Hejdström. 

X is for...

X was always going to be tricky. After a long break, here’s the latest illustration in my Anglo-Swedish exchange of words collaboration with Eva Hejdström... X is for the Swedish word xerofil, meaning plants and animals that live in dry places. Only Y and Z to go - the end is tantalisingly close, and we have exciting plans for making the completed project into a limited edition book!

W is for...

W is for waftage, meaning transportation through air or water. The latest rubber stamp illustration in my Anglo-Swedish exchange of words collaboration with Eva Hejdstrom.

Dwelling

The original package of letrafilm from Sweden

Tiny collages using the stash of letrafilm kindly gifted by Eva Hejdstrom. I’m enjoying working quickly and intuitively at this small scale.

V is for...

A new year, a new letter in my exchange of words with Eva Hejdstrōm. V is for vågig, a Swedish word meaning wavy. . . 

Exchange of Words in Uppercase

Lovely end to the year to return home from Christmas travels to find the new edition of Uppercase magazine waiting. Thrilled to bits that my Anglo-Swedish exchange of words collaboration with Eva Hejdstrōm is featured in this tenth anniversary issue. We’re currently up to V in the alphabet, so on the home strait now. It’s been such a fun project to work on together... the pure opposite of the absolute nonsense of Brexit. Here’s wishing everyone a very happy and creative 2019!

U is for...

Umbratic, meaning shadowy. The latest rubber stamp illustration in my Anglo-Swedish exchange of Words with Eva Hejdstrom.

T is for...

Latest rubber stamp illustration in my exchange of words with Eva Hejdstrom - T is for tjuvlyssna, a Swedish word meaning eavesdropping.