More drawing from the imagination – this time with sore hand

Not too much drawing has been going on. All that filling in with black pen was too much for the existing problem with the wrist – not helped by the fact that I’ve made NINE new collograph plates, and a few books.  All that cutting doesn’t help.

Nevertheless, I still love my new book, Drawing with Imagination, so I moved on to the brush I bought in Japan. It’s like a waterbrush, but it comes with grey ink. Much easier to cover ground with, and easier to push around.  I just love the grey ink – so soft compared to black. 

I have to do ’six to ten’ of these tangled ones. The first was in the previous post. So, now I’ve done two with black pen (hurt!!), two with ink brush, and one with Pitt Pen.  They also cover the ground more easily than an ordinary pen. The colours still bewilder me though. There’s no pale blue for skies, yet the colours that are available, are in some cases so similar to one another. Don’t they have artist advisors?  Of course, I had to get into colour quite quickly. It’s just not me if it’s not colour.

At the same time I’m experimenting with writing on my sketchbook pages – any old writing. If you read what I’ve written, it’s not very meaningful. Nevertheless, Danny Gregory says he thinks that his drawings look better with text, and mine do too. See what you think!  Compare them with the images in the previous post, without text. I think it’s just a better look.

If I haven’t visited your blog recently, I haven’t been blogging much at all. It’s just too cold in the room where the computer is. That is, unless I put the heater in there, & warm it up, and work at the computer for the whole day. Haven’t had time to do that for a while.Yesterday was a collograph day – printing, that is. Terrific, again, though I was a bit ambitious this time. At present the collographs are still a bit damp, and being pressed. My next post will no doubt be collographs.

Drawing from Imagination

I want to show you the drawings I did from my new book, Drawing with Imagination, by Bert Dodson. I’m really delighted with this book. For ages I could only find drawing books that bored me – and now I have three that I LOVE and that cover different areas of drawing.  Danny Gregory’s The Creative License is about drawing from the visual world, and I’ve written about that book in more detail in this post. The other one of the three which I have also written about, is Fast Sketching Techniques. Now I’m happy. But if YOU have a drawing book that I haven’t mentioned, I’d love to hear about it.

My new book “Drawing from the Imagination”, starts with doodles. Anyone can do that! Throughout the book, there are constant exercises, and plenty of examples to illustrate some options for you. The first exercise was to do six doodles. I’ve combined three of mine.  By doing a number of drawings of the same type, I find that I’m constantly making decisions about balance and composition, among other things. I’m already longing to get into colour, but I’ve restrained myself so far. As well as just doing the exercises, Dodson encourages the artist to innovate, and to build on the innovation.

The second group of exercises is some more complex doodles. I’m working on those now.  You musn’t imagine, even for a minute, that this book is just about doodling. Not at all. That’s just to get you started. From there, you go on to all manner of interesting drawings. Imaginary figures, for example.  I can’t wait to move on, but I’m just taking it easy and doing the simple exercises first, to get the most out of the book. I think it’s got a lot to teach me.

The last drawing, I did last night in front of the television.  It’s the first drawing of exercise 2. That’s one terrific thing about drawing from the imagination. It comes from inside your head, so you don’t have to look at what you’re drawing. 

More cool collographs

I thought you might like to see some more of the collographs I printed last weekend. The first two were done with impasto medium. The first one represents sea urchins on the sea floor and the second a tubular sponge – this one is a bit bright for my taste, but with collographs, you never quite know till they come off the press.

I have got some more images now and started to make some more collograph plates to print at the end of July when I have another Sunday with Seraphina.

As well as my ship ones, I’m going to do a series of Queens (we’re talking people here, not ships). I have a collograph of Queen Elizabeth the First – that was the old collograph I was making more prints from.There are such wonderful decorative papers that I want to use, and many of them are not suitable for the ’shipwrecks and the undersea’ theme. So I’m going to make more Tudor ladies – wives of Henry VIII and so forth.

The image I mentioned in my previous post – that was on the Sydney Gallery School website…… that one is an etching – not a collograph. It’s subject is “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.  Mine was called “Botanical”, because I did it with botanicals – a bunch of camomile held by an angel, deadly nightshade held by a skelton, and tobacco plant together with a smoker. Here is a direct link to it.  My other old collographs that were done at the Sydney Gallery School, also under Seraphina’s tuition, can be found here.

This sinking ship is another one printed for the first time last Sunday. Any New Zealander will know which ship this is – the Wahine, which went down in Wellington Harbour 40 years ago. I was in Wellington that day. In fact I had sailed on the Wahine a number of times, & my boyfriend around that time was an engineer for the Union Steamship Company. I knew one of the people who died, and New Zealand being the small place it is, I knew a few other passengers as well. Both the Wahine plate and the next one, of a wreck on the beach, use textured papers as well as impasto medium.

So now you’ve seen all the new collographs, and you have a link to my old ones. Next, I’ll be posting some drawings again. I beat myself up for not drawing much – but you can’t make collographs and draw simultaneously, more’ the pity.

If you’re still not clear what a collograph is, click on my GLOSSARY at the top of the page.