A wonderful week camping in Guernsey in mid-June - lovely to be by the sea in the sunshine from dawn til dusk, and squeezing in a few sketches here and there…
In Bruges
Windmaill gingerbread mould from Bruges Folk Museum
Birds gingerbread mould from Bruges Folk Museum
Postbox in Bruges
Tourists in the main square
Lovely few days away in Bruges in early May (escaping all the royal coronation silliness). Lots of walking (and cheese and chocolate) and a chance to draw in my sketchbook. Just the ticket.
Museum drawings
Recent sketchbook drawings from museum artefacts (using Koi brush pens and Inktense pencils). Some drawings were done in situ (Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and Bristol Museum and Art Gallery) and some from online collections (Pitt Rivers and the Britich Museum).
Week 6 – ink
A rubbing and a drawing of the same leaves
Collage of enlarged photocopy or original drawing
Strange plant matter found in the street
Grape hyacinth seedheads
Pine cone found on the street
My final week of 30 days of daily drawings. These were drawings using Indian ink and some of my plant inks made last year. I really enjoyed completing a drawing every day, and I may not keep it up in terms of theming each week, but I’ll definitely continue filling up this sketchbook.
Week 5 – rubber stamps
Small verbena flowers
The sepals of a rock rose
The sepals of a geum
The daisy-like flowers of Mexican fleabane
Snow-in-summer flowers
A week of carving simple rubber stamps based on plant shapes to create repeat patterns.
Week 4 - water-soluble
Overlaid drawings of cornflower seedlings with water-soluble brush pens.
Sweet William with water-soluble brush pens.
A bold and a quiet drawing of Salvia with dip pen and brush pen.
Bay leaves with water-soluble pens and pencils.
Hydrangea leaves and flowerhead buds with a dip pen and watersoluble pens.
Five days of experimenting with water-soluble media – Koi Colouring Brush Pens and Derwent Inktense coloured pencils. Feel like I need to use these more to explore their potentail…
Week 3 – collages
Using an ink drawing as inspiration for a collage of coloured book pages
A rhododendron flower – look like it could work well as a rubber stamp
A ripped sugar paper collage, and a coloured pencil drawing of the collage
A collage of young sedum leaves (using random papers from my box of paper scraps)…. and a wax crayon rubbing of the collage
Phlox flower – two collages using leftover gouache strips from last October’s daily drawings
A week of daily collages – one of my favourite ways of working as I never know what I’m going to end up with when I sit down with a blank page. Always a nice surprise!
Week 2 - ink drawings
Sage flower (chinese brush on the left, and bamboo pen on the right)
Euphorbia – ink with chalk pastel
Broom - dip pen
Red Valerian – ink blob transfer technique
Penstemon leaves - negative space painted with white gouache, then covered in black ink and washed off… the ink is left in the unpainted spaces.
My second week of daily drawings in May – this week I’ve tried different techniques and drawing implements with black ink…
Draw More May
Monoprint, rubber stamps and collage
Monoprint, water-soluble crayon and collage
Monoprint, foam stamps and posca pen
Monoprint and watercolour
Monoprint, gouache and rubber stamp
Trying to get back into a daily practice of drawing this month (possibly limited to weekdays). This first week I’ve been playing with back-drawn monoprints, and - as I’m always more fond of the left behind bits - adding an additional page using leftovers each day…
Sketchbook Revival 2022
Colour mixing with Courtney Cerruti
Taking Zoom portrait sketches up a notch with Carla Sondheim
A calligraphic folded book and pocket with Rachel Hazell
Pattern making with Faith Evans-Sills
Even the sketchbook was made in a workshop with Sarah Matthews
Apologies for the silence on here recently - I’ve been very busy but just not blogging about it as I needed a bit of a screen break. I’ve had a lot of fun taking part in the Sketchbook Revival 2022, hosted by Karen Abend. Lots of brilliant online workshops (all for free - amazing!) with a lot of inspiration for different creative approaches for filling a sketchbook.
Reviewing the residency
I’ve been finishing off recording my 2021 garden residency (and enjoying taking my foot off the pedal a little). Looking forward to developing some of the pieces in these sketchbooks over the next few months...
Week thirty eight
Garden residency on tour - drawings from a garden in Norfolk
Buddleia dye results
Colourful brush cleaning from my September daily drawings (gouache this month)
My garden residency was on tour last week as I de-camped to Norfolk for the week. A new garden with lots of different plants and flowers to draw. So lovely to have a change of scene, and a long overdue chance to get reacquainted with the sea...
I dyed some cotton lawn with buddleia flowers last summer, but I was keen to see how the colour would turn out across a wider range of materials this year. It was worth the wait... some lovely vibrant yellows and strong greys. The two yellow yarns and woollen blanket swatches show the difference between a cold and hot dye bath. More than a hint of bumblebee about this colour palette... 🐝
Cleaning my brushes after my daily drawings (gouache this month) I’ve been building up vibrant stripes of colour - an appropriate colour palette for a gloriously sunny week in Norfolk. I’m hoping to use these painted swatches as collage material for next month’s daily drawings.
Week sixteen
Natural ink drawing, based on photos taken in my garden (see below)
Black hellebore flowers make a lovely green dye and ink
Planning out an embroidery based on a collage of natural ink splodges
Drawing seedlings
My World Book Night 2021 entry to the Herbarium
The Herbarium on display in Bower Ashton library (photo ©Linda Parr)
Working with grids (again!) this week. I took some photos of different shapes in the garden – mostly steps and decking – and traced these off to make a masked drawing with natural ink. The ink used was rhubarb root, bramble and acorn gall (with and without iron). This feels like a starting point rather than a finished piece, so I’m looking forward to developing this further.
I dyed with black hellebore flowers… only a small batch but enough to see that it gave the best green I’ve managed to achieve yet. It also boils down to a good ink.
I re-visited a collage made a couple of weeks back from my ink sample sheets – I isolated a section of this and have traced it off to make a small embroidery. Quite pleasing to see that a similar palette could be chosen with the naturally dyed threads. I think this will work well on linen.
In between tending to my seedlings (currently taking over the spare room, cold frame and greenhouse) I’m enjoying drawing them in a tiny coptic-bound sketchbook given to me by Eva Hejdström.
Finally, Friday was World Book Night and it was a pleasure to take part again in the annual call for entries to mark the occasion. This year a Herbarium has been created – an exhibition of literary-inspired flower illustrations in Bower Ashton library. My illustration of periwinkles was inspired by a poem called ‘A Tale’ by Edward Thomas. These flowers are my nemesis in my garden… it’s an ongoing battle to stop them swamping everything, so it was good to pause and appreciate the beautiful flowers before I start yanking them up all over again! A pdf catalogue of the Herbarium can be downloaded here. Many thanks to Sarah Bodman and Linda Parr for organising this wonderful collaboration.
New year, new challenge
Empty sketchbooks at the ready!
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.
A very BIG book of patterns
Following on from my workshop with Sarah Burns I started using rubber stamps to make new pattern experiments. After building up a pile of paper, I realised that it would be more useful to have one place to work on patterns so that I can see them side-by-side. So I treated myself to a giant scrapbook (decorated with my Alpha-set) and started stamping. It’s good to be able compare patterns, seeing them side-by-side so I can decide which ones have potential and which ones are duffers. It’s quite an addictive process!
Sketchbook stamping
Continuing my rubber stamping of patterns into the lovely coptic bound sketchbook with different size pages that Eva sent me for my birthday last year. I’m enjoying just making patterns for the fun of it, and hopefully I should end up with a book full of useful ideas. I’m starting to think about the possibility of geeting some stamped patterns printed digitally onto fabric. I’ve yet to fully explore the potential of combining print and embroidery, and this sketchbook could be a good starting point. In the meantime, I’ll just keep stamping…
Alpha-set patterns
More pattern printing with the wonderful Alpha-set…
Lockdown drawing
One of my newest houseplants drawn in wax crayon
Illustrating the lyrics to a favourite song
A character from a favourite book (‘Accordian Crimes’ by Annie Proulx)
Something I found (an old thermometer dug up in my garden in Oxford)
My pet - the wonderful sleepy senior Vizsla, Otto
At the beginning of Lockdown last month I decided to make an effort to draw something every day. I signed up to the Brooklyn Art Library’s 28-day Challenge and followed their prompts. The challenge veered away from drawing after the first week, but I really enjoyed drawing something different and it was a good injection of enthusiasm to get me working in my sketchbook again…
How did it get to be March already?!
one simple stamp, two very different patterns
Oh dear, oh dear. This blog has been very neglected so far in 2020… it’s been a very busy start to the year and this has been one of the casualties of a lack of time. I’ll add some posts over the next week with an update of various things I’ve been working on. As a starter here’s some pages from a lovely coptic bound sketchbook with different size pages and papers that was a birthday gift from Eva Hejdstrom last year. I’ve decided to use it to have a play and create various rubber stamp patterns (mostly from hand carved stamps I’ve accumulated from other projects over the past few years). There’s no end result in mind, just the fun of stamping, but I’ll also hopefully be left with a useful pattern resource once the book is full up.