Mostly drawing

Feather and tea

Posted on September 4, 2014 by Ed Mostly

A couple of sketches done using found/improvised resources during a trip to Grinda, the Stockholm island where I drew the 38 boats. The first was drawn using a dip-nib cut into the tip of a swan’s feather that I found (a bottle lid with Lexington grey from my water-brush was the ink-pot). I’ve never used a real quill pen before, but the nib was surprisingly smooth, and the unpredictable ink-flow created some happy accidents (the shadow in the centre of the rocks where the lines ran together).

Lexington grey in water-brush and swan’s feather, watercolour, A7 – 10 minutes

Then I used strong black tea, left at the bottom of a cup, to add a wash to three scenes I drew from the top deck of the island ferry. It was very pale and went well with the light pencil lines but needed several layers to build up the tone, so it then took a long time to dry… Could work well as a complementary wash with the sepia ink I’ve started using?

Pencil, black tea, Lexington grey in water-brush, A6 – 30 minutes

Posted in dip pen, from life, holiday, inks, kit, Lexington grey, line drawing, monochrome, pencil, technique | Tagged Band of Horses, cutting a quill nib, dip pen, Ferry views, Grinda, improvised sketching resources, Lexington grey, monochrome sketch, quill nib, sepia sketch, sketching from life, swan feather, tea as wash | 1 Comment

Mostly painting

Posted on August 30, 2014 by Ed Mostly

I’ve been reading ‘Urban Watercolor Sketching’ by Felix Scheinberger (here’s Tina’s review). It’s not very ‘urban’, but I recommend it as an enthusiastic, conversational and practical guide to water-colour sketching, with a strong focus on the power of colour. So I’m trying to be a bit bolder with the paint, letting colour do more of the work, with the drawn lines playing a supporting role. Here’s a collection of strange fruit, oranges, bananas, apples and a lemon, all drawn very fast, hence the oddly shaped bananas and wonky cake stand!

Platinum sepia pigment ink and Lexington grey in fountain pen, watercolour, A6 – about 15 minutes each

Posted in colour, from life, fruit, kit, line drawing, technique, watercolour sketch | Tagged 'Urban Watercolor Sketching', apples, bananas, Billie Holiday, cake stand, Felix Scheinberger, fruit sketches, line drawing, oranges, watercolor sketching | 2 Comments

38 boats

Posted on August 16, 2014 by Ed Mostly

While in Stockholm we caught a ferry to Grinda, one of 30,000 (!) islands in the surrounding archipelago. We swam in the warm Baltic and I tried to sketch the many pleasure craft that passed. As most were going fairly fast I ended up with a collection of tiny one minute drawings, I added the shade and colour later. Some of the speed boats managed to tick every box on my list of general irritants: noisy, hurried, expensive, ostentatious, wasteful, and driven by yahoos imposing their idea of a good time on everyone else, harrumph. Which meant the silent, slow, cheap, modest and resourceful kayakers were all Good People, probably.

Pencil, Lexington grey water-brush, watercolour, A6 – 20 minutes

White Gelly Roll pen, Lexington grey water-brush, watercolour, A6 – 20 minutes

The sketches have ended up looking like 1950’s wallpaper for boys (examples from the internet below, not my work!), I think the colour’s to blame….

Posted in boats, coloured paper, holiday, Lexington grey, line drawing, monochrome, pencil, Stockholm | Tagged Grinda, kayakers, Modest Mouse, monochrome, one minute drawings, sailing boats, sketching boats, speed boats, Stockholm archipelago, white pen sketches | 5 Comments

Worshippers, ancient and modern

Posted on August 13, 2014 by Ed Mostly

Lexington grey fountain pen and water-brush, white Gelly Roll pen, white gouache, on coloured paper, A5 – 10 minutes line drawing at the museum, and 30 minutes adding the light and shade at home

A small fraction of the 2,000 votive figures excavated from the open air temple of Ayia Irini in Cyprus in the 1930s. Half of the statues are on display at the Mediterranean Museum in Stockholm (where we saw them, and where you can eat a lovely lunch in amongst the display cases) while the other half are at the Lefkosia Museum in Cyprus. They’ve been arranged in the way they would have stood originally, in concentric semi-circles, all facing a sacred stone. The huge range of faces and expressions makes them a gift for sketching, I kept spotting people I recognised in the crowd!

The Stockholm half of the collection…

…and the Cypriot half.

The crowd of statues reminded me of Antony Gormley’s ‘Field for the British Isles’

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Later the same day I sketched these shop dummies. The way they all faced the same way, wearing uniform clothing, with blank eyeless expressions echoed and contrasted with the ancient Cypriot figures; I’ve no idea what they’re worshipping.

Lexington grey fountain pen and water-brush, gouache, white Gelly Roll pen, A6 – 15 minutes

Posted in collections, coloured paper, exhibitions, Lexington grey, monochrome, museum, Stockholm, urban, white pen | Tagged Ayia Irini, crowd, crowd of statues, Field for the British Isles, monochrome, monochrome sketch, shop window dummies, Stockholm Mediterranean Musem, The Specials, urban sketching, votive statues | Leave a comment

Take off, in-flight, landing

Posted on August 9, 2014 by Ed Mostly

Scenes from a flight to Stockholm… A sketchy impression of the rolling patchwork landscape around Bristol airport as the plane took off, random images from a flight safety card (including a wildly optimistic ‘landing on water’), and planes waiting at Stockholm’s Arlanda airport under low cloud. I couldn’t see out of the window or down the aisle in flight so the safety card was the only promising material to draw! It’s interesting to see how the illustrator simplifies people to a few clear lines, and I particularly like the man whose lazer vision has the power to burn or freeze.

Lexington grey water-brush, watercolour, A6 – 10 minutes

Lexington grey fountain pen, watercolour, A6 – 40 minutes

Pencil, Lexington grey water-brush, A6 – 30 minutes

Posted in airplane, airport, landscape, line drawing, monochrome, pencil, sketching, Stockholm | Tagged airport sketch, Arlanda airport, in-flight drawing, landing on water, Lexington grey, Major Lazer, monochrome sketch, patchwork fields, plane safety card, simple figures, sketching planes, take off view | Leave a comment

Stockholm sketching

Posted on August 2, 2014 by Ed Mostly

Lexington grey in fountain pen and water-brush, watercolour, A5 – one hour

We spent last week in Stockholm, and I was delighted to have the chance to go on a sketchcrawl, kindly arranged by Nina Johansson. Here are Tina (on the fence) and Nina (on her tiny stool) drawing the back of a cement works and docks on the North shore of Liljeholmen, after a heavy downpour and very dramatic lightning storm. My five colleagues were all either bilingual or trilingual, speaking Spanish, French, Swedish, Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese; fortunately for me they also all spoke English. Many thanks to Nina for organising the crawl, it’s lovely to have a local guide!

Posted in buildings, from life, holiday, journeys, people, sketching, Stockholm, urban, waves | Tagged docks, fountain pen, kayak, Nina Johansson, ship, sketchcrawl, sketchers, Stockholm sketching, The Doors, urban sketching, water | 2 Comments

Digital art

Posted on July 29, 2014 by Ed Mostly

Lots more fingers and toes, all drawn late in the evening when there’s nothing else around to sketch. Strange to see my hands age so dramatically as the drawings become more detailed, with more lines and shading…

(A range of pens and inks, mostly Lexington grey with some white Gelly Roll, all A7 and fairly fast)

Posted in body, collections, coloured paper, from life, hands, night, self-portrait | Tagged brush pen, drawing feet, drawing hands, drawing own hand, fingers, fingers and toes, Lexington grey ink, Queens of the Stone Age, self-portrait, white gelly roll pen | 2 Comments

Sushi, again

Posted on July 25, 2014 by Ed Mostly

Back at Yen Sushi for another lovely lunch. From the top there’s green tea, steamed rice, aubergine salad, spinach with peanut sauce, and teriyaki prawns. I ate lots more but it didn’t hang around long enough to be drawn. Below it is the equivalent sketch from a year ago, complete with wobbly restated lines, either caused by sake or inexperience… Progress?

ghg1 Lexington grey fountain pen and water-brush, water-colour, A6 – 20 minutes

Blue and brown Pigma pens, Lexington grey water-brush, water-colour, A6 – 20 minutes

Posted in Bath, cafe, every day matters, food, from life, urban | Tagged chopsticks, restaurant sketching, sake bottle, sketching plates and bowls, sushi, teriyaki prawns, urban sketching, Vince Guaraldi, Yen Sushi Bath | 2 Comments

46 strangers

Posted on July 20, 2014 by Ed Mostly

Urban sketching turns the busy city centre into a giant, free (clothed) life-drawing class. It’s great practise for gesture drawing, and you’ve got to be fast to catch the pedestrians, but some are sitting ducks… Here are members of the public around Bath over the past few months; shoppers checking phones and waiting for friends, lots of bench-sitters, and a queue of tourists for the Roman Baths. The head-down-hands-up phone checking pose is a recent phenomenon and very familiar; 8 of these 46 people are doing it, with only one doing the twentieth century equivalent (reading a newspaper). (Too many inks/pens etc to list, but mostly Lexington grey and watercolour, A6/A7 and all done fast)

Posted in Bath, coloured paper, from life, line drawing, people, street scene, urban | Tagged Bath, checking phones, coloured paper, free life-drawing, gesture drawing, head down hands up, reading newspaper, seated figures, sketching pedestrians, Spacemen 3, street scenes, tourists queuing, urban sketching | 1 Comment

Honeysuckles

Posted on July 12, 2014 by Ed Mostly

Several attempts to sketch highly fragrant Honeysuckle from the last two years. I enjoyed working out the refractive effects of water and glass as much as drawing the very fiddly flowers… Brown/blue/green Pigma pens, fountain pens with Carbon and Lexington grey ink, water brush with Lexington grey, watercolour, A6 or A7 – About 30 minutes each for the top three, 10 minutes the last one