You may remember - long, long ago - before I embarked on the workshop posts, I did one on how to
Make your own Scraperboard, which I had happened upon as a way to make the
Stations of the Cross for Good Friday. It's not entirely appropriate now as we celebrate the happy, joyous side of Easter - but I've been scraping away at my prepared boards in between other things, using
my son as a model (cause for contemplation) for some of the figure studies and summoning other images, scratch by scratch, out of the blackness. I haven't had a chance to sit down and scan, photograph and post all the images until now. For those who are interested in seeing all the Stations, they are over
here at the brand new
St Peter's blog.
The torso and the disembodied hands on the big wooden cross that is a permanent fixture of the church garden worked well - unobtrusive but drawing a closer look.
For anyone who might want to try this technique, a few things I've discovered...
- Do put two coats of white paint on the undercoat and two layers of wax polish, it doesn't give a bright white line through the black ink with just one.
- Don't prepare your board too far in advance - if the Indian ink gets too dry and brittle, it chips off rather than scrapes cleanly.
- On paper, this seems to be quite a stable medium, but on board it is very fragile! A splash of water or a brush past of a sleeve lifts the ink right off the wax surface so when finished...
- Seal the finished art with a spray varnish - I used Grumbacher gloss acrylic painting varnish - not a paint-on varnish or medium, the ink will wipe off like water from a duck's back!
- A craft knife with a snap-off blade is great for producing a wide variety of lines from broad
sweeps with the flat edge to the finest thin line - I found I didn't need anything else.
This past weekend was the Orchid Show at the botanical gardens which are conveniently close by to where we live. Yesterday I took my small watercolour moleskine and tiny tin of paints and tried to sketch surreptitiously around the displays. I couldn't get over the huge variety of species of orchid, including some tiny delicate indigenous beauties and one huge magenta coloured one that smelled like a heavenly confection of vanilla, cinnamon and other spices. I wish I'd gone to look on one day and sketch on another, as I didn't get around the whole show after dawdling over my doodles - but glad I braved the curiosity of passers by, who were only pleasant and respectful of my attempts!
And... some long-timers who've read my blog for a couple of years may (or may not!) remember these posts from August 2008 where I painted three very big watercolours on request for possible sale to a client of an art promoter friend, for his offices. After much paint, paper, and long urgent hours of slog... he rejected them and they disappeared off my radar screen until a couple of weeks ago when Jane asked if she could put them on an exhibition at the new iStore, how cool is that! And they all sold! After I'd totally given up on them. in fact I was planning to use them for collages or recycling of some sort when I got them back. 
There they are hanging against the stairwell - they weren't even framed, which would have been a very expensive undertaking, but Jane's clever placing of them suspended in space was very effective. Below that some sculptures by 
Johannes and Collen Maswaganyi with part of the Sandton skyline behind them.
A quick sketch of a bit of garden, done with ballpoint pen and watercolour some months ago - the jacarandas are full of leaves now - to say I'm still here. After all the intense activity of the workshop and the Stations, I've hit a slump! I've been arranging and re-arranging my watercolours (it's called procrastinating) to make them easily transportable for walking and sketching, and managed to get a little tin with six colours, a waterbrush, small sketchbook and a pencil into an old make-up bag tied around my waist - cunningly hidden under my T-shirt so nobody tries to remove it in the hope that it contains untold wealth. I did this little 10 minute sketch yesterday at the dam - found I'd packed the wrong little moleskine - a plain notebook instead of the watercolour one. Oh well, will get it right sometime!
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