Sketchbook Exchange 2016 (part 5: Shiny)

Shine on you crazy diamond and Venus in Furs (Shiny shiny, shiny boots of leather)
Graphitint, graphite and ink; Quink, white and silver Uniballs, carbon pencil and coloured pencils

Wine Glass Reflections
Oil pastel; Watercolour and white uniball

Sketchbook Exchange 2016 (part 2)

This was a tricky one. The theme is still texture; the sub-theme is meaning.

I started off by thinking about how we read texture - primarily through our hands.
So I drew my hands. Note that it's mostly my left hand...

This was the last page that I drew, but the second page in sequence.
It occurred to me that texture is often used in simile,
so I had a bit of fun with some common phrases.

My husband suggested this one to me. Sometime during my lifetime (and his), these textured paving slabs have started to appear on the footpaths. There are ridged ones (whose main purpose seems to be to redirect the wheel of your road bike; quite why they are used on cycle paths I do not know), and there are these bumpy ones (the bumps are "truncated domes") that indicate the best place to cross the road; the texture, of course, is primarily intended for people with impaired sight.
This image is based on a crossing place close to my home. I used heavy body white acrylic to give the page some bumps (not very convincing truncated domes) and drew over the textured page with Molotow marker pens and Uniballs, including some explanatory text.  

The last of my pages in this book is an extension of the "tactile paving" idea.
This time, one hope that the primary users of the textured surface are able to see, because it is a road and the cobbled rumble strip / road hump / sleeping policeman is supposed to be for the benefit of the motorist. The macro-texture is intended to be felt through the vehicles wheels and should encourage the driver to slow down. Again, I used heavy body acrylic for the texture - spreading it thickly to make the road hump and incising it with the knife. There's a cheeky hint of a song drawing that refers to the 59th Street Bridge Song. "Slow down, you're going too fast... "

Sketchbook Exchange 2016 (part 1)

Artists from West Berkshire and North Hampshire Open Studios have started their 2016 sketchbook project. This time, we made our own sketchbooks, concertina-style.

I wasn't enamoured of the floppy card cover. Having been assigned the theme/subtheme Textures/Grain, I decided to use some things with grain to replace the card...

3mm beech-faced plywood, carved, with leather. Held together with nuts and bolts from an I-can't-believe-it's-not-Meccano toy and annotated with Molotow marker pens

There are only four pages per artist in these books, so I crammed several grainy things onto my first page:

Pine grain (Derwent Drawing), grains of rice and salt (Molotow), wheat (pen and ink, acrylic); sand (Molotow)

(It being a concertina, I thought I'd use the back of another page and put some grains there, to be seen through the knot holes. There are a few that can't be seen easily, too).

... and the next page was also home to several thoughts:

Wooden handle of hand chisel (Molotow), alabaster grain (watercolour and watercolour pencil); pointillist landscape, imaginary (Molotow)

But the last two pages were home to one idea. A fairly off-topic idea, inspired by the "grain" more than by the the "texture".

John Barleycorn, folk song, as sung by Traffic. Molotow and acrylic inks

It's a song drawing. They started in last year's sketchbook exchange project, and they've come back in this year's.

#C2C15 Textures and Shapes in Nature

Monday was the Cover to Cover sketchbook exchange day, and here are my contributions to "Textures and Shapes in Nature":


 


My new theme is "Spots of Time" and is well underway...