Monday, October 10, 2016

Playing with Inks

Urban Sketchers Johannesburg (yes, we're now an official chapter!) was invited by Assemblage, a local visual arts community organisation to join a challenge to use only Lamy products to produce artworks or in our case, sketches. Lamy provided a range of their pens and inks to share among the participating artists. I have my own much-used Lamy safari pen plus a spare for just-in-case, so filled those and took a few extra colour cartridges...a cool pinky red, a viridian-ish green, another luminous yellow-green, purple, and a few drops of a dark prussian blue and turquoise in containers.

A shed at 1Fox - old industrial warehouses now restaurants, bars and event spaces... note the chandelier!
Most of my sketches ended up looking purply-green and I discovered that the luminous green was the only warm shade I had, and mixed with the pink had to serve to make skin tones and browns. With a high pigment load the intensity of the inks is amazing though, a little went a very long way.



Sketching friend Leonora and I sat on a busy street corner in the city and I sketched the traders. The guy selling cosmetics, combs and sundries in the "two Rand shop" never let up his call for a minute of "pondopondotworandi", interspersed every now and then by his neighbour yelling "Walalawasaba" which, I believe, means "you snooze, you lose!"


The same corner, slightly different experiment with the pens and ink. I tried swapping cartridges in the pens to see if they would show a progression from, say, green to purple, but as the pigments are so powerful, I would've had to put in a few km's of line to show the complete changeover.
Dismal attempt at the lovely old building on the opposite corner... need some architectural drawing workshops!
My Blog List has disappeared from my sidebar... I have no idea how - I reported it to Blogger Help and someone(?) said they were aware of the problem but so far nothing has been restored. Anyone else had this happen?

5 comments:

RH Carpenter said...

Love these! The colors are powerful but so interesting in the color choices - amazing stuff! Yes, I've had my whole blog list disappear for a day or two and then reappear - no idea why! ha ha So I imagine it will all return some time in the near future. I never contacted Blogger because I figured it wouldn't do a bit of good and I'm try very hard to practice my patience on it! ha ha

Unknown said...

May we display your header here on our new site directory. As it is now, the site title (linked back to your home page) is listed, and we think displaying the header will attract more attention. In any event, we hope you will come by and see what is going on at SiteHoundSniffs.com.

Sadami said...

Hi, Cathy, the sketches and the post are lovely, but sorry for the blog list headache. I hope Google or Blogger will help you. Take it easy. Please do not get stressful. Best wishes, Sadami

Cathy Gatland said...

Hi Rhonda, glad to hear your list came back - here's hoping mine will do the same!
Thanks Sadami, I'm not stressing too much... have been thinking I should give the blog a whole facelift and this might be the start of it!

Ginny Stiles said...

Sure hope it comes back. I'd hate to lose mine!!!