Even more faces

A couple of these sketches were from old family photos - the lady in the large hat looks like she was around in the Edwardian era.

A brief taste of Spring

Well, it was actually more like mid-summer for three days at the end of last week.  The boots, scarves and jumpers were discarded in favour of light and cool attire and we spent a beautiful day at Batsford Arboretum in Gloucestershire.  The swathes of daffodils were almost over, but were being replaced with snakehead fritillaries, primroses, wood anemones, magnolias and cherry blossom.

I made a basic plein air sketch of this quaint Japanese style building using pen and Inktense pencils, adding more line work and stronger watercolour washes later at home.

Note to self:  remember the old saying "Ne'er cast a clout till May be out".  We are now back to cold, wet and windy!

More faces

Graphite on drawing paper

More practice from online images.

Drawing practice - faces

With a little time to spare, waiting for visitors to arrive, I did a couple of pencil sketches from images on the internet.  Quite a useful exercise - will try and keep this going.

I don't watch much television, but when I do get involved with a drama series, I keep a sketchbook handy and try to capture the facial features of one of the main characters.

Graphite on cartridge (drawing) paper

April sketch group

Yesterday's meeting took place in Town Gardens - a Victorian style park in the old town area of Swindon.  Threatened showers cleared to give us a reasonably mild morning with some welcome glimpses of sun.  I had previously sketched the ornate bandstand here, so decided to try the Aviary which houses quite a variety of exotic small birds.

Town Gardens Aviary - fine liner pen, Pentel brush pen and watercolour crayons
on Hahnemuhle Grey Paper

I was trying out some newly acquired watercolour wax crayons and am not really happy with my efforts.  The background trees were far too bright, so I scribbled over some black crayon and was able to try out a scraffito effect to add a bit of texture.

I definitely need to practice with these a bit more to achieve better results.

I was impressed with the sketches by this artist pat.southernpearce and wanted to attempt something similar.

Test colours on tan paper (Paperchase sketchbook) -
water added on the righthand side

Colours tested on Arches wc paper - white crayon has been
added over the six colours at the bottom which has muted
 them slightly

A purple, circle book

Yet another of my circle books, made for a special birthday.  I chose two shades of purple card for this and, due to the thickness of the card, I opted for six pages instead of eight.    Gesso was used with my own linocuts for the decoration, with added highlights and handwritten message in silver and white gel pens.  The purchased gift bag was embellished with toning paper flowers fashioned from old book pages.

Each circular page was 5" in diameter

The folded card fitted into the smaller handmade gift bag