Graphite, Arches Aquarelle and me..........

Before I started stamping just over a year a go I was working primarily with die cuts and as many of you know 'cause I witter on about it, prior to that I was painting portraits.

Well, here is something that I started about 5 years ago (hanging my head in shame) and as you can clearly see it's not finished!!

ELIJAH WOOD

Click for close up view

I decided to experiment with some of my beloved Arches Aquarelle NOT watercolour paper, drawing on it rather than painting - a challenge to say the least.  The vast majority of my pencil work has always been done on cartridge paper and this behaves very differently.

Watercolour paper comes in 3 types:

ROUGH - Course surface

NOT - Moderate texture & most commonly used for watercolour.

HP (Hot Pressed) - Relatively smooth and great with pen and ink work.

In hindsight, HP would have been the wise choice, but I didn't have any and as you can clearly see from my sketch the bumpy surface affects the pencil, and it smudges like crazy - once completed I've got some serious clean-up to do and will have to spray it with fixative to prevent further smudges.

Why am I showing you this unfinished piece - simple, procrastination!!

I've come up with awesome excuses for myself as to why the poor boy still only has half a sweater and I'm hoping that by posting this I will be somehow compelled to finally finish him.



Something different

I was tidying my studio today & came across one of my old sketch books.  Thumbing through the pages I found a figure I drew many, many years ago & thought I'd share it with you......

Portrait in colour pencil

I always used to work in coloured pencil back then, mainly Caran D'ache on cartridge paper.

She's always been a favourite of mine & it seemed such a shame to keep her hidden!

Well here we go.......



Oh boy, I've lurked for long enough, admiring all the stunning work that the inhabitants of Bloggyland are producing and finally decided to take the plunge and have a go.

Where do I begin, well I guess with my paintings - several years ago I was inspired whilst watching Watercolour Challenge on TV to have a go at painting, something I hadn't really done since I left school.  The medium suited me well, although unforgiving if you make a mistake, it dries quickly and there's little smell - ideal for me as my son was small at the time and inquisitive little fingers would appear from nowhere - can you imagine the mess if I'd been using oil paints!!!!

Here's one of my first paintings - some of you might recognise him:

Portrait - Ronan Keating

I was fortunate enough to be asked to undertake numerous commissions, these are definitely my favourite ones:

Portrait - Girl in pink

Portrait - Couple outdoors

When we moved house I packed up my brushes and tried my hand at something new - die cutting.  It took me a while to get the hang of it, but I soon realised the possibilities and unbelieveably I even got the opportunity to design some dies, these are examples of three of them!

I found that chalk ink worked really well to shade the dies and give them depth, the only drawback being that I constantly had inky fingers!!

 

And right now..............................Copics, stamps and more......................but that will have to wait until the next post!

 

Thanks for looking and I hope you'll come visit my Box of Colours again.