Category Archives: pencil

Chim chim cher-ee

More soft pencil sketches; Summer evening views over Bath chimneys and roof-tops to the trees beyond. There’s a couple of seagulls flying home to roost (?) in the first one, and more of the telephone wires I love in the … Continue reading

Posted in Bath, buildings, landscape, pencil, rooftops, seasonal, sky, urban, urban sketching, watercolour sketch | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

In praise of pencils

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 , , , , , , | 7 Comments

mostly Greek

More sketches of classical statuary, mostly from the ongoing ‘Defining Beauty‘ exhibition at the British Museum, which is so full of wonderful stuff that I ended up doing very fast drawings with a marker pen, out of sight of the … Continue reading

Posted in body, coloured paper, exhibitions, figures, London, monochrome, museum, objects, pencil, sculpture, statues | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

En route

Fellow passengers on the way to Cordoba; waiting at the airport, sleeping on the plane, and passing time on the train. Pencil works well for larger and more detailed portraits, it can be hard for a face to recover from a poorly placed ink-line… (My previous post got … Continue reading

Posted in airplane, airport, coloured paper, faces, from life, holiday, journeys, monochrome, pencil, people, trains, travel | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Monochrome flames

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

Posted in blind drawing, coloured paper, fire, from life, inks, Lexington grey, line drawing, monochrome, night, pencil, sketching, watching | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Open wide…

I’ve tried ‘extreme sketching’ a couple of times before, drawing while walking along (see bottom of post), during a paintball session, in the rain, and while on a merry-go-round. I enjoyed the challenge and the resulting shaky lines, so last week I had a … Continue reading

Posted in Bath, coloured paper, eye, from life, hands, Lexington grey, line drawing, monochrome, pencil, people, self-portrait, waterbrush, white marker pen | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Two Dogs

First there’s Skip, who sat beside me while I sketched people on a beach in Tenby. She was poised and alert, watching a gap in the fence where a rat had just appeared and vanished, but I had to be quick! Then there’s 3 … Continue reading

Posted in animal, coloured ink, dogs, from life, line drawing, monochrome, pencil, pets | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Sketching cars #1

I kept noticing interesting cars during the Summer, and tried sketching a couple of them. Here’s Eelke’s well-loved and well-travelled Citroen DS (it’s a ‘1974 DS 23 Pallas injection electronique hydraulique’). Eelke had driven it from Holland, around England, Wales and Ireland, and was on his … Continue reading

Posted in Bath, cars, coloured paper, from life, line drawing, monochrome, pencil, urban, vehicles | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

I, Robert

Some robot/robert sketches from Japan, mostly at the Tokyo Museum of Emerging Science. First some animatronic manikin heads that nod and change expression empathetically when you speak into a microphone. They’re looking down on Asimo, the museum’s star attraction, named after Isaac Asimov, … Continue reading

Posted in body, coloured paper, from life, hands, inks, Japan, Lexington grey, line drawing, pencil, people, robots, Uncategorized, urban | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

One bad apple

Another go at mostly painting, just using pencil lines for the overall shape and some pens for the lettering on the sticker. I usually add water-colour at the end of a sketch, after establishing line and shade with ink. Here it … Continue reading

Posted in botany, food, from life, fruit, objects, pencil, sketching, technique, watercolour sketch, white pen | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment