Hahnemuhle surprise parcel!

An early Christmas present from Hahnemuhle - certainly a lovely surprise!

My package contained a tin of 30 watercolour postcards (approx 4" x 6"),  a Faber-Castell water brush and watercolour pencil with extra thick lead, all with a nice hand-written note from the Hahnemuhle team.

All wrapped up in red tissue within a red bag

The water brush is only 5" long, which makes it a useful addition to a small pencil case for outdoor sketching.  In addition, the cap is designed with an angular edge which can be used to scrape lines into damp paint - very neat.

Testing out the water brush cap on some watercolour swatches

Winter landscapes

Next week I have booked a place on a day's workshop with mixed media artist Soraya French.  The theme is "Expressive Textured Winter Landscapes in Mixed Media".  I am already sorting out what I need to take with me - it seems like a mountain of supplies - acrylics, inks, oil and soft pastels, gesso, texture paste, glue, collage papers, palettes, paper, brushes, pencils, etc. etc.  These are all the materials I have on hand at home, but the thought of hauling all these on public transport (at least for one leg of the journey) is quite daunting.  Maybe time to think about an old ladies' shopping trolley!

In the meantime, I have been sorting through my sketches for some suitable reference images and will include two or three from a winter Norwegian cruise we took some years ago.

Stockmarknes - pen and watercolour

Snowy Nesna - pen and watercolour

Turf-roofed fisherman's hut, Saltstraumen -
pen and watercolour

Latest circle book complete

I have now finished the circular book mentioned in my last post.

When open, the booklet measures 5" across and 2 1/2" high, fitting into the quadrant box when closed.

Materials used: 100 gsm cream paper,  computer printed text, hand-printed with acrylic tinted gesso foam stamp, edges cut with "deckle" scissors and stained with acrylic and gold ink.  Quadrant box - cardboard covered with red mulberry paper, decorated with gold ink and collaged stamped image.

Circle book in progress

I have been busy on my Christmas card design - it will be a simple lino print image again this year - but more about that nearer the festive season.

Meanwhile, I have  a couple of special birthdays to make booklets for, so for the first another circle book is in production.  I have used this peony design before, but needed to make a larger foam stamp, allowing enough room for the computer printed text on the 5" diameter pages.  The cover will probably be decorated with the peony bud image.

Life Drawing

My local art society held a 2 hour life drawing workshop this weekend.  The first half was with the model clothed, the second half unclothed.  Despite quite a short time span, those attending managed to produce quite a few very good sketches.  It's definitely something I could do with more practice at.

We started off each session with a couple of 5 minute warm-ups, followed by two longer poses of 20/25 minutes.

Three of my 5 minute warm-ups:

Charcoal pencil

Charcoal pencil

Conte pencil

A couple of the longer poses:

Charcoal and pastel pencil

Charcoal and pastel pencil over
acrylic sponged background

November sketch outing

Despite early rain, we had a good turnout for our November urban sketchers meeting, with three or four new people joining us.

The venue was the town's first municipal cemetery (dating from 1881), but now closed to new burials. The area is a quiet green space and designated nature reserve surrounded by streets of Victorian terraced houses originally built for the expanding workforce of Brunel's railway workshops.  The chapel is now only used on special occasions, but the caretakers kindly agreed to open the building up so that we would have somewhere to shelter should the weather deteriorate.

All comforts provided!

The Gothic Revivalist style chapel

I used the Hahnemuhle Grey sketchbook, which I had already prepared using soft gel medium to add a piece of randomly painted tissue paper to one of the pages.  The resulting surface proved to be rather slick for the watercolour I tried to add to my pen sketch - perhaps acrylic or ink would have been a better choice, but I enjoy experimenting with different approaches.

The Chapel, Radnor Street Cemetery