Jacaranda Time Again...

I'm glad I got at least one little sketch of them in, as over the weekend, after a week of scorching heat, we had tumultuous storms of wind, rain and hail that stripped many of the blossoms off their stalks. Hopefully more will bud, I haven't had my fill yet of the purple glory time!

 ...and the end of Inktober. I didn't much like following the prompts, but sometimes they led to revelations and discoveries - below are some of the drawings I did enjoy: 

Thinking of/feeling the word to form the shape of the action, like Throw, top left - I think this was a stick I dipped in coffee and swirled around, then dropped ink into the wet marks and finished off with some descriptive lines. The next one, Coral, almost made itself - the natural movement of ink marks on a wet or damp surface formed coral-like textures - and a fun, quick Chef, after a carefully illustrated one was rejected.

The bottom three were more personal - Float - from a photo of my daughter, though it doesn't look like her - water and its distortions are always interesting, as are Shoes, especially well-used battered old takkies - and Hide - my little 3 year old granddaughter's idea of how to do it...(smiley face with hearts emoticon here)

I'm trying to figure out what it is I really love to do, as time runs away at an ever faster rate and I don't want to waste any doing stuff I don't love any more, so Inktober was good for that at least. Some days were diamonds, and some days were stones! 

Inktober 2020!

Where has this year gone?...into a blur of world-changing, life-changing upheavals and restrictions, time to paint, draw, crochet, bake, read and think, and think too much. But it's October, INKtober again. It's become a marker of time, slightly annoying (so much work!) but a serious threat of FOMO if I don't once again haul out the inks, pens and brushes and just do this thing. 

I really needed to find a way to make it enjoyable, engrossing, surprising - otherwise it's just a slog and takes up too much time. Last year I found that some tiny freestyle ink-and-coffee doodles I did, and developed into images (kind of like seeing pictures in clouds) led to unexpected happy results, far preferable to my more laboured responses to the prompts. So this year I'm doing it slightly more intentionally, thinking vaguely of what I want the blobs and splashes to form but trying not to control them too much... until sometimes I do😒

Above are the first six days, following the prompts. Left to right are Fish, Wisp, Bulk, Radio, Blade and Rodent. Some of the coffee and ink splashy beginnings below, the top two with Throw and Fancy in mind, the bottom two just random, hoping they'll become something...

 

I really love the interactions of coffee and water and ink, thinking I should just leave some of these as they are, but that seems like a cop out! 

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps

Holding thumbs this works out - a video of some sketches from 2018 in my Seawhite-of-Brighton big black sketchbook. Thanks to my techier husband Bruce for adding the soundtrack... Perhaps I could have sketched more... perhaps the next one will be better... perhaps I'll take my sketchbook out today... I'm always glad when I did, and regretful I didn't do so more often. 

Here we're fastening seat belts for a rough ride in 2019, with elections coming up, all parties and factions at each other's throats, and much damage to be repaired - I'm really hoping it won't be as tumultuous as I fear. To you, all my sketching, painting, drawing, blogging, following friends, wishing you a very happy, peaceful and productive New Year.

Can you do the Canna, can!

Is anyone still out there? It's been another long time since I've been here on the blog, and no excuses, but back with an intention to post more regularly, even if just for my own documentation.

I've been trying to find the pure pleasure of drawing and painting again - after far too long of producing work to order, that seems to have gone by the wayside a bit. I think less writing, which takes me longer and longer, and more artwork is the key to keeping up.

These drawings I made when I had a problem with my left eye recently, which was frightening to say the least. After months of fussing about what to draw, what to paint, when, how and why... when faced with an actual threat to my ability to do so, I just sat down and drew what was in front of me, a desiccated canna flower on my studio windowsill. I resisted doing Inktober again, as a pressure I wasn't feeling up to, but got out my Indian ink, watercolours, and the dregs of my morning coffee to make these. My eye is OK again, thankfully, after a small op, but a lesson was quickly learnt - less pondering, more action. Seems obvious doesn't it!?

The End of Inktober

I'm pleased to relate that for the very first time I tackled - and finished!! - Inktober! Spurred on by the fact that I'd committed to exhibit the results along with a lot of other artists at Assemblage, otherwise I'm certain I would have given up around day 4 as usual. There is one missing, due to being knackered after a morning's intense drawing at the bookshop (see previous post), which I'll catch up with for the show. And that yoga one 'Deep' has simply disappeared so I'll have to re-do it.

I started thinking I'd follow the official prompts, but after several attempts at No.1 'Swift', decided I'd rather draw what was in front of me around my home, and did a series of my daughter's succulents which she's left for me to plant-sit. I ran out of those and reverted to the list - from no 11 'Run', with an urban sketching day at Rhodes Park (a future post) in between 'Fat' and 'Filthy'...can you spot those? You can see them on my Instagram if you'd like to have a closer look.

It was a good discipline to do... of course it develops pen, brush and ink skills - although I tried such a variety of techniques none of them really got polished. It was far more demanding than the hour or so per day I imagined I would spend on it, and distracted me from the recent and satisfyingly regular rhythm I'd got into of going into my studio and working on my very own projects and painting ideas - a lifelong goal. Sigh, my middle name is Distractability.

Things I'll do differently if I do it again:

• Have a consistent paper, size and format, especially if going to show them afterwards. I made them look pretty neat here, but they're all different sizes, weights and textures. I was trying to use up old stocks of paper and sketchbooks (a major throw-out has to happen soon) and the ink reacts differently on each - some paper sucking up the ink washes and making messy blots around the edges.
• Have my own restrictions and theme instead of following the prompts - although they're fun to interpret, my results were all over the place.
• Preferably draw from life - drawing from photographs, memory or imagination feels too much like work, or a commission, which I don't enjoy, although I've loved what others have done doing that.
• I'd do it quickly so that it doesn't take over my life - I tend to overdo what I do do and neglect everything else that needs to be done.

This method was quick and fun - allowing the ink do its own thing within the drawing. The drawing implement was a very cheap plastic dropper that came in an Artliner refill box. I filled it with diluted ink which flowed smoothly and in varying thicknesses over the surface, then added spots of ink here and there for darker tones and drew some finer lines out with a nib while it was still wet. As in this baby bird in a nest, 'Squeak'...

And the most time consuming one, 'Teeming' where I crazily chose insects to teem, although many of them were added as doodles while I waited for pots to boil and ovens to warm, so not as painful as it looks.

Playing with Inks

Urban Sketchers Johannesburg (yes, we're now an official chapter!) was invited by Assemblage, a local visual arts community organisation to join a challenge to use only Lamy products to produce artworks or in our case, sketches. Lamy provided a range of their pens and inks to share among the participating artists. I have my own much-used Lamy safari pen plus a spare for just-in-case, so filled those and took a few extra colour cartridges...a cool pinky red, a viridian-ish green, another luminous yellow-green, purple, and a few drops of a dark prussian blue and turquoise in containers.

A shed at 1Fox - old industrial warehouses now restaurants, bars and event spaces... note the chandelier!

Most of my sketches ended up looking purply-green and I discovered that the luminous green was the only warm shade I had, and mixed with the pink had to serve to make skin tones and browns. With a high pigment load the intensity of the inks is amazing though, a little went a very long way.

Sketching friend Leonora and I sat on a busy street corner in the city and I sketched the traders. The guy selling cosmetics, combs and sundries in the "two Rand shop" never let up his call for a minute of "pondopondotworandi", interspersed every now and then by his neighbour yelling "Walalawasaba" which, I believe, means "you snooze, you lose!"

The same corner, slightly different experiment with the pens and ink. I tried swapping cartridges in the pens to see if they would show a progression from, say, green to purple, but as the pigments are so powerful, I would've had to put in a few km's of line to show the complete changeover.

Dismal attempt at the lovely old building on the opposite corner... need some architectural drawing workshops!

My Blog List has disappeared from my sidebar... I have no idea how - I reported it to Blogger Help and someone(?) said they were aware of the problem but so far nothing has been restored. Anyone else had this happen?

Spring in Black & White

 We were down in Franschhoek again last week, mon mari (a little French to suit the location) very busy with meetings, so I had plenty of time to chill - and there is no better place to do that - reading books, drawing and just gazing at the amazing scenery. The house we stayed in has a number of beautiful old black and white drawings and prints of trees in it and I was inspired to try using just pen and ink (my Lamy pen with a fine nib, and Noodlers black ink) to sketch in spite of the seductive brilliant greens just beginning to sprout from every dry branch and vine.

A pair of Egyptian geese had produced a family on the pond outside the house - last time my husband was here there were seven goslings, now reduced to three with a sighting of a rooikat (caracul or lynx) with a little feathered body clamped in its jaws reported! I sketched the survivors grazing on the lawn - their ruthless parents were now dive-bombing them to chase them off the premises - oh to be a bird!

I did try one little watercolour sketch of some indigenous watsonias against the fields, trees and mountains but my sketchbook paper and clumsy waterbrush conspired against the beauty I was trying to portray (well that's my excuse anyway).

Sky High in Jozi

I'm sorry Blog for neglecting you so long - one of the reasons I started here was to motivate myself to do more drawing and art - right now I'm doing so much I find no time to report back!

On the painting course that has just come to an end, was a lovely person who works for the company who built the student apartments that I've been drawing as it progressed. Jill got us an invitation to come and sketch at the top of the newly finished block, bringing to a pinnacle (I won't say end - I hope to go back) a serendipitous urban series that I had no idea was happening when I started. Mill Junction has the most astonishing 360° view of Johannesburg and its southern/western suburbs - at last was the perfect time and place to dust off my Japanese fold Moleskine that we excitingly found in our goodie bags at the Lisbon Urban Sketchers Symposium three years ago.
I sketched fast, trying not to get bogged down in details and get as much done as possible in the time, but it was the first Suddenly Summer day after winter (blink and you miss Spring) and extremely hot up there, so after only about 90° and four hours I had to call it a day. And I did do details - it was fascinating to see how streets that I've driven on and around for years connect and intertwine with landmarks, familiar buildings and each other.
Students started drifting up to start fires for their Friday evening braais (barbeques) in the beautifully designed recreation area up there, and the sketchers reluctantly returned to earth and the more familiar street level view of this ugly/beautiful city, and its high-walled suburbs.

Draw, draw, draw

I have been busy drawing for my upcoming course, 'Objets Trouvès' with Greg Kerr which starts in Johannesburg next month. Part of our prep was to find an object - not your regular Still Life subject matter which may have been drawn and painted to death already - but something unusual and perhaps strange or unappealing that happens into your life or surroundings.
I had a few false starts with things I found - a woodwork plane - too linear, a toiletries travel bag - too tedious with its zips and meshes, a computer fan - too hard and mechanical... when one day a storm approached, the wind blew, a painting flipped off the mantelpiece knocking off and breaking an early attempt at turning wood on a lathe by my son - which made me a bit sad until...aha, voilà! I had my objets!

There's something deeply satisfying about completing and beholding 20+ drawings you've done of the very same item. I usually draw something, tick it off and seldom feel inclined to do it again, so before I began I dreaded all that slog before me, certain I'd be bored to tears halfway through. But tackling one frame at a time, and with options of different mediums to do it in I became absorbed in the challenges and new perspectives of each rendition.

Starting with three drawings with the humble HB pencil, moving onto six in charcoal and going onto my favourite method, water-soluble ink with bleach, water, brushes and pens (I had whittled a new bunch of bamboo pens while watching cricket on TV days before) which I explored and experimented with for the remainder of the 20 - I've only shown three of those ones here, will get to photographing the rest sometime. So interesting to play in this technique but be warned if you try, I'm told they won't last - the paper may rot and the ink fade!

St John's College

Not many kilometres away, but a million miles in other respects from the graffiti, vendors, noise and smells of Newtown, are the hallowed grounds of St John's College, a prestigious private school where three of us went sketching on Saturday. With historic stone Herbert Baker buildings arranged around immaculate gardens and sports fields, every direction we looked held another perfect scene waiting for our attention. In fact - apart from having a quick look at the north side, where the wind was blowing and school buildings far too imposing and intimidating to draw - I didn't stir from my first chosen spot in the shade (on a steaming hot Spring day) in the David Quad, just turning to face front, left and up!

I took ink, dip pens and an array of sharpened sticks, determined to try and sketch in the medium of Kiah Kiean, whose work about brings tears to my eyes it's so beautiful. Of course mine is nothing like it, as it should (or shouldn't) be, but I enjoyed the different lines and unexpected results, in spite of my attempts to control them. An organist practising in the chapel nearby, over and over and OVER again was the only slightly jarring note after an hour or two, but I took it as a lesson - practice practice practice!

Sketchy People

Thought it's time I practice some fast people-sketching, while trying to take note of how I do it, so that I can pass on some tips to those who will be joining me in Lisbon at the Urban Sketcher's Symposium. I was very happy to hear that we will be paired with a Portuguese speaking person who knows Lisbon well - and that my person is Isabel Fiadeiro, the other out-of-Africa (though far away from here) USk correspondent, who already feels like a friend, and who also knows the ropes of a symposium from last year's in Portland.

Yesterday four of us went to Rosebank's Zone II, a new pedestrian mall to find some shoppers and al fresco action. I decided to restrict myself to a black water-soluble Pentel Signpen with waterbrush for quick tonal values and to try and fit in lots of loose-ish sketches.

I attracted two chatty onlookers, both very interested and interesting, so I ended up not doing as many sketches as I'd planned to, but had good practice in trying to talk and draw at the same time, something my left and right brains don't usually co-operate on too well.

I must say when I look back at when I started urban sketching and how nervous, to the point of shaking, I got at the prospect of being spotted while trying to sketch people 'live', I've come a long way! There are still some who are patently uncomfortable being observed and sketched, and others who are delighted and even pose, but I've learnt to remove myself from their reactions, unless I suppose they come over and ask me to stop, I carry on regardless...

At times, while I was drawing these sunny carefree scenes, I tried to imagine an enormous, catastrophic, unspeakable event descending over our lives as has happened in Japan - beyond imagination and my thoughts and prayers go out constantly to everyone affected.

Sad tale of a Dikkop

I had rather a sad walk yesterday - soon after I left home I found a trail of striped feathers, leading to a poor, quite large, injured bird under a bush, panting, hiding its head and wishing (I imagined) that the world would just go away. I decide to carry on with my walk, and if it was still alive when I got back, try and do something to help it. It was, so I fetched a basket from home, picked him up and put him under a tree in my garden while I went to look him up in the Bird book and find a phone number for the zoo.
He's a Spotted Dikkop - and I realised when I read the description that we've been hearing him often at night lately - a loud panicked sounding call when all else is still. I had thought it was a bird in distress somewhere, but apparently this is it's territorial scream!
When I went back to check on him, he was dead - killed I suspect, by a certain delinquent black cat in our neighbourhood who I've seen tossing pigeons around with the greatest exhilaration.

I couldn't let such a magnificent creature die in vain, so I spent a few hours drawing him and his feathers that I went back to fetch from the crime scene - in my newly-established sepia nature journal, though I added a bit of watercolour to soften the contrast - for the feathers I used mostly watercolour after finding the pen too harsh and scratchy for their softness.

Resolutions for a new sketchbook

I found this little nest in our garden last week and drew it with dip pen and sepia ink, in a lovely new A5 sketchbook that my nice nephew brought me from the Tate. I want to be quite consistent in medium and subject matter in this book, but annoyingly, before I'd decided this, I started on the first page with a watercolour sketch (below) - not a great one, and the paper doesn't suit w/c well. Also annoyingly, I wrote in the notation on the nest page that it was built on stalks of the jacaranda flowers, when it's the leaf stalks that are falling like rain right now. Will I ever have a neat and ordered showpiece sketchbook? Concentrate Catherine!

The Fairest Cape

We're just back from a visit to Cape Town, for a birthday and a short holiday. We thought we'd be going into the notorious Cape of Storms, with weather forecasts of raging gales and torrential rain as we left Joburg - but after a day or two of drizzle and greyness, we got "The Fairest Cape in all the World" (Sir Francis Drake) instead - sparkling sunshine, blue and white sea, awe-inspiring mountains, autumnal vineyards... at its best it has to be about the most beautiful place on earth!We did lots of socialising and driving (had to take full advantage of unlimited free miles in the hired car!) so my watercolours remained untouched and the sketching I did was in 15 to 20 minute sessions, usually around a meal. The sketch above was done from the 'Green Room' we rented in Camps Bay high above the sea, which was a good thing, as that was where all the storm action was. I added colour at home from photos - the day I sketched it was grey and misty. I've gazed in awe at these magnificent cliffside homes over the years and never dreamt I'd ever get to stay in one. As our hostess said, they found a piece of paradise when they bought here 20 or so years ago.

This was over breakfast on Sunday morning from a beachfront café - everything was lined up in rows...waves, cars (I managed to draw the back of a car resting on the front of an SUV - it wasn't really so!) , palm trees, umbrellas, restaurants... We went for a walk along the beach later and saw the aftermath of the storm - thick cappacino foam all over the sea and sand, kelp knotted around every protuberance and beach chairs that were chained together to a post broken, battered and buried. Who would be a sailor!?
An inexpertly pieced together montage of photos taken from the road at the back of our apartment - the mountain range called the Twelve Apostles

Learner's Licence

After saying I wouldn't have time... yesterday I had plenty of time to draw people waiting in queues at the Traffic Licensing Centre. My son was booking to take his Learner's Licence next month. We had tried the day before and I had been reduced to a gibbering frustrated wreck by conflicting instructions on what to bring, where to go and what the opening and closing times were. But yesterday we got there early and a mere three hours later we were able to go home.

I'm so glad I've got into the habit of taking sketching stuff with me wherever I go. As always, the time went quickly (not for my son, for whom it stood still!) and I felt a productive sort of morning had been spent.

Strange doodles

You wouldn't think a simple action like picking up a coffee cup would give you a flash of how life could change completely in an instant - but something in my back went twangg and I was suddenly unable to perform a hundred tasks and movements that I'd previously taken for granted. Thankfully it is on the mend - whew! - and bending and stretching seems once again feasible!
I've been reading an old out-of-print book that came my way called 'Techniques of Drawing' by Fred Gettings - full of interesting insights, one of which is the connection between handwriting and drawing. When I think how little I write longhand these days, it's no wonder a pen sometimes feels awkward and unnatural in my grip. He recommends creating abstract forms from your own handwriting and developing them into 'meaningless' drawings with texture, light, shade and form. My doodle above is not this exercise, and I can't remember if I did it before or after reading that, but I enjoyed making the (gobbledy-gook) script just as a tone in the negative shapes - makes me think I should make the effort to write more often.
I did some urban sketching yesterday - and felt strongly the awkwardness of the pen as I started drawing the excavations on the left. A bit more comfortable with the curvy staircase on the right, but still not as loose and free as I'd like to be. These with more info if you'd like, over on Urban Sketchers...