High-speed Still Life

sketches

Don’t get me wrong, I like slow drawing. I love to follow a contour at the speed that an ant would trundle along it. I find cross-hatching, bracelet shading and stippling mindlessly absorbing – or should that be mindfully?

But, as I’ve recently been taking a close look at the work of Quentin Blake, I can also see that it can be liberating to have a change of pace and to lighten up a bit, so each of these little details was completed in a minute or so. No shading, just outline.

As we reach a milestone on what we hope might be a steady return to some kind of normality, I should explain that I’m drawing these on location only because we’re in my brother-in-law John’s support bubble, on our regular socially-distanced visit. Monday morning walking around Illingworth Park with John is the social highlight of our week.

Jill Nalder

Jill Nalder

Jill Nalder, actress and activist, was this week’s sitter, painted by Gregory Mason on Portrait Artist of the Week.

Jill Nalder

Jill has been taking part in hedgehog surveys in Regents Park. In the area between Primrose Hill and Regents Park she says there should be about 300 hedgehogs but the surveys have revealed that they’re down to just 27 individuals. Rather than doing a hedgehog rescue, the group are looking at ways to ensure the population is sustainable.

Sultana Scones

scones

Luckily, I had Barbara to call on when I had a bit of a scone dough disaster this morning. All it took was her cool, calm manner, a spatula and the perfectly judged addition of extra self-raising flour.

loaf

I was on safer ground with our regular half wholemeal/ half plain flour loaf.

I drew the scones with a Waverley Pen nib and the loaf with the similar looking but slightly larger Telephone Pen nib. I think that for me the Telephone Pen, with its ‘Turned up Point’ is a bit smoother to draw with, which suits me. That’s just as well because I have just one Waverley Nib but luckily I’ve got an almost full box, containing a gross (144) of John Heath’s ‘Golden Coated Telephone Pen’ nibs.

Published
Categorized as Drawing

Four Shades of Grey

John Welding

My illustrator friend John Welding – who, thanks to lockdown, we’ve spotted in passing on his bike just once in the past year – posted some beautifully shot ‘drapery’ studies of himself which he’d taken as reference for an illustration project (loan of flat cap by Steve Hopewell).

I needed a tonal subject to test out my ink washes on, so this was ideal, so many thanks to John.

I started drawing from his photograph with a dip pen with a Waverley nib, using De Atramentis Document Ink.

Pen and Wash

I’ve revived an ink wash system that I used on location in the Peak District when I worked on my black and white published sketchbook High Peak Drifter. The washes from then had dried up long ago, so I cleaned out the jars (they’re plastic sample jars from a pharmacy) and remixed the four greys. Since testing them out in these swashes, I’ve made the ‘Pale’ and ‘Med. Pale’ a bit lighter and the ‘Dark’ a bit darker. As with the drawing, I used De Atramentis Ink.

Garage

garage

We’re rather unusual on our street in keeping a car in our garage but, like most of our neighbours, we use it as a store and work space. My 1976 Astro Daimler bicycle leans against the back wall but it hasn’t been used for years and when I last used it occasionally, it was to take parcels to the post office, rather than to get out touring the landscape, which was its original intended purpose.

boots

Our favourite way to get out in nature these days is to put on our hiking boots. They’re sitting on a unit saved from our old kitchen, which has proved to be a useful work bench.

Still hanging on the shelf unit, a string of large Stuggart Giant onions. We had a bumper crop of them last year, but because of cold, damp weather when we harvested them, they didn’t keep and soon turned bad.

Quite a Year

baby year 1

We’ve yet to meet the latest arrival in the family, but she hasn’t had such a bad year. And after all those new experiences, this card features a pop-up of the birthday girl taking a relaxing bath . . . in a kitchen sink during a holiday in the highlands.

Published
Categorized as Drawing

Cliff Card

cliff

A card for a beachcombing marine biology enthusiast (he lives not far from The Deep, which I’ve yet to visit).

Shed

inside the shed

There isn’t room to walk into our shed without moving the stack of plastic trugs that stand in the doorway. On the left, hanging on the wall or leaning against it, are spades, forks and rakes, some of which belonged to my father and some to my father-in-law, Bill Ellis. I’m particularly glad to have a long-handled cultivator – a four-pronged cross between a fork and a rake – because I think that might have come from my grandad, Robert Bell, who had an allotment just across the road from his cottage in Sutton-cum-Lound near Retford.

The large black pond net, which I use to scoop up duckweed, would probably be safer stored in the garage as it’s had several holes nibbled in it by the mice that occasionally adopt the shed as their winter quarters.

The Deflated Duo

Deflated Duo comic

Yes, I think we all know the feeling. Although this homemade card has a post-Christmas theme, it’s actually for my niece Hannah’s birthday, earlier this week. Based on a real life incident, when Hannah and Sam’s blow-up Santa in the front garden got switched off when an electrician was working on their kitchen. The penguin was unaffected.

Deflated Santa

By then these Christmas characters had become a feature of life on the avenue and a little boy was quite alarmed to see Santa lying there, but his mother was suitably reassuring.