Facilitating A Very Informal Drawing Workshop

Drawing......

First the beach gathering on a glorious sunny day on Findhorn beach after gazing at the pod of seals.

Then to start drawing.  The first task was a group drawing.

 

 The result

Love the vibrancy and energy in this drawing

And then we worked on our own

 Annes' Drawing

Emilys' Drawing

Wonderful.

Beach Drawing Series

Started a beach drawing series .....here is the first batch

 

Studio Shots

Walls are starting to fill up.....it had been a very surprising struggle to get going this time

 

 

Nothing seems clear....including this photo...5th attempt!

Hello to all my South Korea followers

Please feel free to comment!

I am suffering from, well I don't like to call it artist block but it's just not happening.  So I am now trying to give it a jig along.  Trying to encourage a bit of flow in the work practice.  Revisiting some tests from earlier in the year

These are just little sketches if you like...so I am not going spend ages trying to get the perfect shot.  The idea is to jog my mind out of its inertia. Left to right thinking I suppose.

Beach Gatherings

Mmmmm it all seems a bit vague at the moment.  You know that moment when you are desperately trying to connect with your work and nothing is happening....

Anyway loving the curly piece of birch and the sea worn piece of hardboard....nice embossment I think

Working at the Moray Art Centre Studio

I have decided that my beach gatherings are going to be very thoughtful.  In that I mean I am going to try to be very selective about what I bring back to the studio.  As usual it takes me time to settle down and get cracking.  I am trying to work out how to start where I left off in Cromarty.

The wild beach at Findhorn on Saturday

The gatherings....

I found myself getting excited with the shadows but the lighting wasn't suitable to make it more exaggerated 

Testing out a new template for the blog

Good Photos

Well I have spent the last few days trying to take good solid photographs that show up the embossment and don't have weird bits of extraneous colour randomly scattered over the image.  And I think this morning I have almost succeeded.  I just have to give them all a title now.

It is driving me nuts that they show up on here much darker.  After spending all that time making them right they look all dark on here....they don't look this dark on facebook.
So bear in mind that these do look lighter..........Time to find an alternative to this blog I think.  Ok...I have the titles

'tip & spill'

'cast ashore'

'tidelines'

'forage'

'sea stained'

This last one here is called 'Beached"

Going Insane

Trying to take photos of my work......basically trying to get all images looking the same and taking photos of white paper is almost impossible.  Todays efforts so far...

More printing

Really pleased with the tests I have been doing...but it's a hard job trying to dry the prints flat.  The covered bricks I use have had a moonlight job to do keeping up the broken middle post of a bed.

So the prints are coming along nicely and the deadline is midweek next .....I am trying not to think about it and just get on with them.  It's not the end of the world if I miss it

Just trying out some shapes and colours.  I was going to put a digital chine colle on a couple of the prints  but printer ran out of ink so whilst eagerly awaiting the post I am working out other strategies just in case.

 

Sorry about image quality, I just don't have time to worry about exposure right now.  Really pleased with this lithograph feathery drawing.  The left side of this image will have an embossment on it ..yum

This looks quite good too.  The pale green is actually darker and I would lighten the deep red.  These are objects collected from the beach in Cromarty.

I think this orangey ochre looks quite good with the green grey. Back to the grindstone!

Testing some samples

Having a technological battle with scanners and printers today.  The epson printer has decided to choose it's own colours and it won't head clean grrrr

So working out some solutions to finish these prints as quickly as possible as there is a deadline looming large. Placing shapes to work out composition.

The large white shape at the top will be some kind of colour, I am thinking a light sepia at the moment

 

Testing my new prints....wind drawings on top of monoprints, not quite sure this is working visually yet but cracking on

The set up!  This seaweed that I like using (think it's kelp) is sometimes illusive.  I was on the beach last week and there was loads of it.  Today hardly any.  Anyway...so set up my first beach drawing machine, tide just turned, unfortunately no idea of wind speed but it was very calm, which is what I want.  I don't want a wild drawing on these particular images as the prints will be quite small.

So I am  testing pens and marks.  I decided I wanted grey instead of black pen but not sure this is working our so need to do a couple more tests.

Source material for another woodcut.

Open Studio at Ardyne, Cromarty Arts Trust

Had a wonderful day opening my studio.  I had thought to cancel as we blown away the day before with a storm that left us powerless for 24 hours and some of Cromarty all over the weekend.  The weather was wild but some brave souls ventured out and came to visit.  I was particularly honoured with a visit from Robert and Sabine from Germany who travelled from Findhorn to see my work.  We had a wonderful exchange of thoughts and ideas.

Open Studios at Ardyne:  Sabine, John and of course me

Just realised I was being captured on camera (which it has to be said I am not usually fond of!)

Test Prints...fairly successful I think

So as the large embossed prints below took so long to print without a press I decided to do some small ones to work out colours and composition.  Really pleased and excited with them.

So first off I traced the outline of a gorgeous piece of seaweed and made the cutout as explained earlier and then rolled out the luscious greeny grey ink for the background.  Once this was dry I soaked the paper and then blind embossed by hand without the press.  I have used Fabriano 5/5 and somerset satin white to see which worked best.

The next step will be to do a seaweed drawing which will be placed towards the top of the print.

The other cut out

This blogger blog is infuriating...my apologies for images not in the right place...this is due to trying to get the image I want to appear on facebook and where as you used to be able to choose which image you posted, you now don't get an option so you have to trick it.  I will address this when I finish this residency.

So the other cut out......as I used wallpaper lining that came in a roll when I started cutting the shape it was all kind of curvy.  When I arrived in the studio the next morning it had escaped off the cutting map and created a lovely shape.  Very reminiscent of my architectural sculptures from a few years ago.  I became very excited and can see the future potential of this....

 

"art should spill out of being beautiful and move over to other aspects of life so that when we're not with the art it has nevertheless influenced our actions or our responses"  j. cage

Heading towards a first good final print

Just hoping I have not jumped the gun here by the statement in my title.  So using a full size sheet of Fabriano 50/50 gorgeous paper, it's lovely white printmaking paper, I have created two embossments of what I first thought was not a very successful woodblock print but it seems to have worked in this instance.  Using a scrubbing brush.  Sore wrist.
One inverse, one converse, trying to make up my mind which I prefer......Anyhow so these are now done and then....

I have made this second cut out as a template to do a monoprint on top of the above embossment and then....on top of that if it looks ok I am going to place a seaweed drawing. I am thinking a very pale whitish or transparent turquoisey blue.

So it will be a woodcut of seaweed, a shadow drawing of seaweed and a seaweed drawing itself!

The bigger Print

Ok....so I am creating a couple of big prints.  I have hand embossed two sheets of Fabriano 50/50 gorgeous paper....with the large woodcut of seaweed.  They are currently drying out.  I found this fab piece of seaweed yesterday on Cromarty Beach.

Drawn round it

And am now in the process of cutting it out to use as a stencil.

After banging out two embossments with a scrubbing brush and cutting with a scalpel my wrist is saying no no no so I am going to have to be patient.