Category Archives: blind drawing

Improving a bamboo dip pen

Posted on October 12, 2016 by Ed Mostly

My current favourite mark-maker is a bamboo dip pen. I love the free-flowing lines that can wander around the page, and it’s great for ‘blind drawing’ of foliage, clouds etc. It delivers big juicy lines that can merge into forms if you … Continue reading →

Sketchy selfies

Posted on October 8, 2016 by Ed Mostly

The latest crop of selfies, including some in coloured ink and bamboo dip pen, along with blind drawing mirror fun (that’s the fourth one!). There’s the usual range of self-portrait expressions from sullen to severe via surly, and a higher frequency … Continue reading →

Posted in bamboo dip pen, blind drawing, body, coloured ink, eye, faces, ink brush, line drawing, self-portrait | Tagged bamboo dip pen, De Atramentis inks, inktober, Primal Scream, self portraits in ink, sketches of eyes, sketching selfies | 2 Comments

Cloudy, with a chance of sketching

Posted on June 5, 2016 by Ed Mostly

A collection of cloud studies (more here). The third one is the same cloud drawn three times as sunset arrived (I ‘overcooked’ this sketch and should have stopped much sooner. They’ve ended up looking like Aegean islands…). And the last two are … Continue reading →

Posted in blind drawing, colour, sky | Tagged blind drawing, contour drawing, Inktense pencils, Midlake, sketches of clouds | 7 Comments

Cloudy

Posted on April 3, 2016 by Ed Mostly

The same cloud sketched four times, continually changing as sunset approached (‘cloud’ is sometimes more verb than noun). The light pencil lines were mostly drawn blind, with watercolour wash added straight after the final drawing, the colours still fading from the sky. The … Continue reading →

Posted in Bath, blind drawing, clouds, collections, line drawing, sky, sunset, twilight, watercolour sketch | Tagged blind contour, blind drawing, is this an urban sketch?, Kate Bush, pencil sketches of sky, sketches of clouds, sketching at sunset, sketching the sky | 2 Comments

Pencil landscapes

Posted on November 21, 2015 by Ed Mostly

As a break from ink-brush propaganda here are some pencil landscapes from the Summer. The first is on a lane in Lancashire during a light rain shower, the second and third on the Galloway coast (clouds over the distant Isle … Continue reading →

Posted in blind drawing, clouds, Galloway, landscape, line drawing, pencil, sea, technique | Tagged Blind Boys of Alabama, blind drawing foliage, gum arabic as fixative, pencil landscape sketches, sketch of birds on a wire, sketch of sky at dusk, sketches of Galloway coast, sketching in pencil | 6 Comments

In praise of pencils

Posted on June 27, 2015 by Ed Mostly

I’ve tried to like pencils, really I have. I love their woody simplicity, but never found one that felt right on the paper (too waxy, too smudgy etc). But a couple of weeks ago I tried a Grafwood 6B. It’s consistently … Continue reading →

Posted in Bath, blind drawing, buildings, cars, figures, hands, kit, line drawing, pencil, people, street scene, technique, urban, urban sketching | Tagged drawing of hand, pencil sketches of people, pencil street-scenes, sketches of Bath, urban sketching, urban sketching kit, water-colour rose | 7 Comments

Monochrome flames

Posted on February 8, 2015 by Ed Mostly

A couple of mid-winter sketches, trying to capture the dancing shapes of a log fire. I drew ‘blind’, watching the flames to catch their individual fluid shapes, feeling out the lines with a pencil, and occasionally looking down at the page to get their location about right. They reminded me … Continue reading →