The first of three posts collecting sketches from a recent trip to London, all drawn with a Duke Confucius Fude pen, some onto pre-stained pages, with various washes/colours etc
Fellow passengers waiting on the opposite station platform…
Myself in the window as the train sped through the evening…
Cafe customers…
My host (deepest apologies to Adrian for this shocking libel)…
And finally Londoners out and about in the city, mostly sketched from the top deck of a bus (a few in another cafe).
Looking across the Somerset Levels from the top of Cheddar Gorge, clouds back-lit by the sun. There were boats sailing on Cheddar’s circular reservoir on the right, too tiny to draw! Sketched using a water brush dipped into grey ink, wet into wet for the clouds, allowing me to tweak and fine-tune the tones/values. I love the patterns of hedges, trees, roads and buildings stitched out across a landscape, hazy patchwork calligraphy under huge soft clouds. Older examples of cloudy/hedgy views below, including more of the Levels…
Last week I accidentally wandered into cubism through blind-drawn continuous-line selfies… I recommend having a go, they only take a minute and the results are so strange that you can’t make any ‘mistakes’. Hold a pencil ready to draw on a page, look into the mirror and draw your face in one continuous line without looking down at the paper. Let your eyes move around the contours and features of your face and trace the same movement with the pencil. It becomes a magical mystery tour as you attempt to keep track of where you are on the page and try not to fall off the edges. Then enjoy the reveal when you look down! Some of them look like reflections in moving water, some like I’ve been badly beaten, and some are just odd. As I look at them I can recognise some of the lines/shapes I habitually use when drawing selfies, but it’s as if they’ve been drawn by someone else; most peculiar!
Five more sketches on pre-coloured paper, with blue and golden yellow backgrounds this time, the idea being to approximate skies and Bath stone, ish. I used the same process of drawing with the juicy fude pen, and then adding the greys and whites to build tone and contrast (as with the other ones I’ve posted recently). I’ve also used a bit of blue/golden yellow watercolour to extend the colour field out, or to add sky/buildings/lights into the sketches (and hot pink for the sitar case!). The overall effect can be a bit extreme but is fun to explore…
All the locations are in Bath; from the top there’s Walcot House cafe, then Kingsmead Square, a sitar busker by the Abbey, a general view of ‘Abbey Churchyard’, and finally looking down Stall Street.
Remembrance Sunday in beautiful autumn light at Bath Cenotaph this morning. The band playing, a vicar leading the service, wreaths being presented and the salute being taken; a distant dog barking and a toddler laughing during the two minutes silence. “Stay and remember those who died…” I managed to get a great spot to view the scene, with a policeman just below on the right.
Some previous Remembrance Sundays…
Four more experiments sketching on pre-stained paper, this time using a homemade sepia ink for the stain, leaving a white border. From the top there’s a quiet moment in The Waterstones cafe, two busy scenes near Kingsmead Square, and finally the Roman Baths steaming on a cold autumn afternoon, all drawn with the fabulously juicy and variable Confucius Fude pen. It’s fun using various ‘whiteners’ to adjust the tone, alongside the usual dilute grey ink brush. Each whitener has its own qualities:
The latest batch of quick late evening mirror selfies from my daily drawing habit. All done using the blackest and least smudgy pencil that I’ve found, the Staedtler Mars Lumograph Black. It’s high carbon and low (no?) graphite so the drawings don’t have a grey graphite sheen to them, but you can smudge the lines when you want some tone. Much more of this type of thing in this friendly Facebook group.
There are 200 more of my analogue selfies in this post…
