A sketch in time

Sketchcrawl #34

2012-01-23T12:48:00.001+02:00

Our Sketchcrawl took place at the Old Observatory, where we were greeted by a spectacular new (to me)view of Johannesburg and the strange round-topped buildings that house the telescopes, or the few that are left. The main big telescopes have been moved to the new Observatory in Sutherland, and there is a slightly abandoned air about the structures scattered around this site, though there are plans to turn it into an interactive Science Park according to their website.

I joined most of the other sketchers - great turnout this time - on a high round platform with a panoramic 360° view. (Do go and check out Barbara's sketches for a really comprehensive visual report of the day!) I did a quick warm-up sketch of the little library and some of the towers, but wished I'd brought my Japanese fold-out Moleskine - a perfect place to fill that, I'll have to go back when I've got plenty of sketching energy and time!

I then went inside the building on the left, and ambitiously thought I'd fit in the whole telescope with its sliding window above it (I'm sure there are technical terms for all these things, but I don't know them). I didn't, and got a little grumpy trying.

I went off to find something more in my comfort zone, and settled on one of the lovely old windows of the Herbert Baker-built library surrounded by its warm golden stone walls.
By which time I realised how hot and dehydrated I was - and hungry - so into the cool library for a sandwich and some water, and finally found a shady place to sit on the stoop for my last sketch of the day, pleasantly peaceful apart from the sound of a persistant chainsaw somewhere down in the valley.

Railways and Bridges

2012-01-17T13:32:00.000+02:00

Joburg Sketchers ventured into the city on Saturday - well, the gateway to the city - where the fairly new Nelson Mandela bridge spans the railway lines, connecting Braamfontein and the Northern suburbs to Newtown, Johannesburg central and the South. We parked in the grounds of the Holy Trinity Catholic church, which Barbara and I tried sketching while waiting for everyone to arrive (right), which was the start of a challenging few hours drawing architecture and lots and lots of lines!

We worked our way towards the bridge, some of us getting very successful sketches along the way. I had a huge truck obstruct my first view of the bridge so only really got to work again once we were on it. Looking down, the converging and swerving lines of the railways and trains, the bridges and highways, the verticals, diagonals, horizontals and criss-crosses were so intricate it was almost impossible to see what was what and I kept swopping implements to try and capture it all. Then a quick look up and a half-hearted, not very hopeful attempt to get that soaring perspective above me (left).

We then decided to look for a more distant viewpoint, eventually landing up on the 4th floor of a parking garage, where we had a panoramic view of the bridge, the railways and part of the city. I managed to stick to just one drawing tool this time - my aquabrush filled with Ecoline watercolour.

You can see everyone else's sketches here on Facebook, and Cathy, Barbara and John's posts on their blogs.

Here are five versions of the same scene, from slightly different angles on the bridge, from left to right, Barbara, John, Anni, me and Cathy Giordini-Bricka - I love seeing the different treatments!

A Slow Start and Slow Painting

2012-01-13T10:04:00.001+02:00

I'm having very frustrating computer problems at the moment - technology stuck in the last decade - so can't scan or web browse. It's gone for an overhaul and I hope will be back in action soon. I'm using an even older slower machine, which I'm likely to throw out of the window if I try to do anything too complicated, so I've found some images in the hard drive that I haven't shown here before.

This is a painting I've been working on, or should I say agonising over, for 15 years or so. It started out as a completely blue painting of five figures, which was cold and boring - so eventually, after years of pondering, I superimposed another version of the figures over that with some colour (below).
After learning about glazing last year, I sketched in different poses of the figures with a red oilstick, and glazed layers over, trying to abstract it a bit more. In the version above, I added some digital lighter shapes which aren't in the actual painting... yet... who knows how it might go over the next fifteen years. I can't see it objectively any more. If it weren't such a big canvas - 122cm x 76cm - I'd scrap it and call it a day.

I haven't made any ambitious resolutions, but I do wish you all a wonderful, productive, creatively fulfilling 2012, heavens, there are only 11 and a half months left. At least I get to spend more time in my studio when computering is so painful - if I had made resolutions, that would be one!

Looking back

2011-12-31T10:40:00.000+02:00

What a year, what a sketching, painting, writing, thinking, planning, travelling year! It may not have looked like it to you here, as I didn't quite keep up reporting on it all but when I look back... whew...
It was the year of:
The incredible Lisbon Symposium
The Postcard from my Walk exchange

The Art of Urban Sketching book - due to be launched world-wide in February, and in which Johannesburg, and I feature!

The Dark Cloud - a fully-packed year long painting course

A Don Andrews workshop

Giving my own first workshops - first a sketching one here at home to practice for the symposium, and after much needless anxiety, the 'Urban Portraits' in Lisbon

Trips all in a row to Zambia, Portugal and France

The flourishing of the Joburg Sketchers group, which has gathered lots more participants and is in need of more efficient organisation and - dare I whisper it - another blog

While many would have taken all this in their stride and hardly blinked at all this activity, I have to admit to feeling wrung out towards the end of 2011. All the new experiences, commitments and schedules so different from my normal laid-back and pretty secluded lifestyle were a shock to my introverted system - happy and exciting, but still a shock. Keeping up my own postings, and with everybody elses on the art blogs, Flickr, Urban Sketchers and Facebook just got too much and I apologise again to everyone I neglected.

Looking back at the year in pictures from the postcard project is very satisfying. A record of the seasons turning in Joburg (apart from one done on holiday in Zambia), memories of who I was sketching for, when and where - after all the insecurities that we all seemed to share about producing cards 'good enough' to send - I approach the end of it with mixed feelings. The eagerly awaited postcards plopping through the letterbox took forever to arrive, while time to make another one to send, seemed to come round as soon as the last one was stamped and sent off. With three to go, I've stumbled and fallen behind with this too, but will catch up soon and show you my wonderful collection of cards from a lovely bunch of artists and friends from Sketchercise. In the meantime you can follow them all arriving to and from around the world here at Postcards from My Walk.
I'll be back with wishes for the New Year!

Happy Christmas!

2011-12-22T07:10:00.001+02:00

On another jacaranda-painting expedition a few weeks ago with our sketching group, I ended the session with a couple of sketches of the thousands of fallen bougainvillea blossoms at my feet. I found the brush shaped petals and forms so enjoyable to paint, even roughly and quickly as I did them then (below), that I collected a hatful to take home. Yesterday I got to spend another happy hour or so painting them, now dried, more carefully, but still trying to keep them carefree. I think they'll do to wish every one of you a wonderful, joyous and peaceful festive season, however you celebrate it, wherever you are.

A Home to remember

2011-12-11T14:14:00.002+02:00

One of our regular Joburg Sketchers, Barbara, invited us to her home yesterday, for a delicious tea and to sketch features of the lovely old house in which the family has lived happily for 30 years, and which is now on the market as they prepare to move into a new stage of life. Barbara is going to make a journal and sketchbook of the history and memories of their time there, and thought a sketching session by our group would get it off to a good start - we'll send her digital copies which she can print and put in the album. The house is full of beautifully crafted details from its early days, as well as modern open spaces that made it a very happy and welcoming home.

I started with the armchairs around the fireplace with an impressive brass collection on the mantelpiece, that must have overheard many an interesting discussion over sherry on cold winter's nights - and then to one of the lovely bevelled glass leaded windows (top) hosting a collection of wooden birds.

Barbara's little terrier caught my eye, basking in the sunlight coming through another window. I had to get her down quickly first before moving on to the surroundings as I knew she wouldn't stay there long - and she didn't, as soon as she realised she was being stared at.

John set up his easel and did an oil painting of the outside cottage. As I said before, Joburg is emptying out for the holidays, so only four of us got there - but hope it gets the ball rolling for the special record this journal will be.

Carols by Candlelight

2011-12-06T17:24:00.001+02:00

This is the line drawing I did last week at the Zoo Lake Carols by Candlelight on Wednesday. I started sketching in late afternoon sunshine, when Simba the Lion and Father Christmas did their thing, and ended in the dark, lit by candles and spotlights as the Salvation Army band, the choir and the Nativity play swung into enthusiastic action.

After a while my Lamy pen was running out of ink and I couldn't see my page any more, so took the line drawing home and tried different techniques - wax crayons, watercolour wash and black and white pens and markers - to try to capture the sparkles, shimmers and glows of the night scene.

Carol concerts and Christmas Fairs have to be held early in Johannesburg. From now on, everybody starts packing up to go on holiday and from the 16th when the Builder's holidays start, it's practically deserted. Carols by Candlelight is an old tradition here, where families pack picnics, presents for needy children, blankets, granny and the kids, and gather in their hundreds on the grass under the stars.
The little girl in the middle seemed to find the drawing lady more interesting than all the entertainment behind her, but when the candles were lit she joined her mom to sing - there at bottom left.

Historic Glenshiel

2011-11-30T16:40:00.000+02:00

My friend Anni arranged for us to go and sketch in the beautiful gardens of Glenshiel on Saturday, one of Johannesburg's historic Randlord homes, housing the Order of St John which ran it as an auxiliary military hospital during World War Two, and now as an ambulance service. I chose a view with plenty of flowers and foliage in the foreground so as not to have to tackle all that architecture, just having a manageable corner peep through. Even so, it took me most of the afternoon to get that little bit of building down.

After that effort I turned to a tiny house that I thought had been some lucky little girl's wendy house, but which I now read is 'Polly Ann', one of many similiar Tudor Style cottages that were built as a a fundraising effort during the war, forming 'Olde England" with a Wishing Well and a Town Sign Post - I was wondering what those were doing there!

And last, with my architectural skills exhausted, I sketched a gnarled old tree trunk before going on a stroll around the rest of the property, finding a rose garden, a waterfall with a pond, plenty of nooks and crannies and a beautiful view over the Northern suburbs - plenty to go back for if we get another chance.

Jacaranda Joburg

2011-11-11T13:29:00.001+02:00

Purple, purple everywhere right now - the jacarandas breathtakingly taking over the city - above our heads, below our feet as the fallen blossoms cover the streets, and wherever you turn. Trying to photograph and paint them, it seems impossible to really portray their glowing abundance of colour. On the left I tried splashing and dropping it on, emulating the flowers that drop constantly onto my page, and above, rolling the brush loaded with the staining dioxazine violet around the page to build darker tones but still trying to keep them light and luminous.

We're having a heat wave, and these scenes of women walking with umbrellas and pushing the prams of the babies they take care of are everywhere up and down the shady avenues - pure summer in Johannesburg!

Roaming around Rosebank

2011-11-02T10:07:00.000+02:00

Wow, this blog has hit 300 followers and I can't see any of them on this page or in my dashboard - I still haven't figured out why - but thank you! Sorry for another long break, I've been doing a bit of work, and dithering around with all sorts of projects, getting out to sketch now and then...

Cranks restaurant in Rosebank, from under a lovely jacaranda tree that I squeezed onto the edges. The jacarandas are out all over Joburg now, not as prolifically flowering as usual, but still magnificent.

Then I had lunch in another sidewalk café, sketching people in the restaurant opposite

A few days later - a booksale in a Rosebank courtyard - my friend Anni, and I tried sketching from another viewpoint and were chased away by a security guard, so we asked the book sales people if we could sit close to them - next to another security guard - if we promised not to raid the till, and escaped the 'loiterer police' long enough to get down some browsing figures

After which we were ready for a cup of tea- and we drew the Friday after-work crowd gathering around us in peace

And an attempt to sketch people walking briskly past - still loving the waterbrush filled with Ecoline for this!

Sketchcrawl #33

2011-10-18T12:05:00.001+02:00

Sketches from Saturday's Worldwide Sketchcrawl - our merry group of four went to Parkview, a suburb with a lovely villagey shopping area. We started with the very intricate newly renovated building at the top. The metal fretwork is called 'broekielace' here, referring to the lace on undies! - and is found on old buildings all over South Africa. We moved on to the fruit & veg shop, where we had to sketch fast as the sun came over and started to bake us and our watercolours - and then to the Anglican church of St Francis which had some welcome shade, a lovely garden to sit in, and music as a choir practised inside the building! On the left, a regular artist in Parkview, painting the buildings on canvases which he sells to passers by.

Sketching Woes

2011-10-10T11:55:00.000+02:00

Oh my, after a couple of weeks of slow, contemplative painting I went out this weekend for some fast on-the-spot sketching and was all at a loss as to where to begin, middle or end. Its scary how quickly the confident line escapes when not in daily practice! But for the sake of keeping the blog updated, I'll post some of my not-great sketches anyway, and hope to do some better ones soon.

I went to the Rose Gardens in the nearby park on Saturday - the early roses not quite out yet but lots of springily dressed young women, with many photos being taken on mobile phones of poses amongst the fountains and trees.

Yesterday I drove into the city, to Main Street Life, an 70's industrial building that is under refurbishment and together with Arts on Main down the road, is an island of art, good accomodation and cultural activity in an otherwise rather grubby, ugly part of Joburg. The rooftop of the building was the venue for a charity event, 1000 Drawings, where people are invited to draw or doodle on A5 paper to be sold on one night in November for R100 each regardless of artist or artwork. Excited to see the city so close, I had to try a cityscape sketch, and then turned to the other drawers - no one that I noticed was sketching the surroundings or people, most were bent over their own creations of doodles and illustrations. I continued to struggle to get down a flowing, happy line, but by the last sketch, thought it was slowly returning to my faltering pen. Must not leave it in my bag for so long again!!

Northcliff Hill

2011-09-28T13:41:00.000+02:00

After weeks of gorgeous Spring weather our little band of only three sketchers decided to go up to the second highest point in Johannesburg, Northcliff Hill for the 360° view. It turned out to be a cold, windy, overcast day so John and I, in our light spring-y clothing, cowered beneath the ridge where we couldn't see much of the scenery, but were at least out of the grip of the chilly blast. Barbara came a bit better prepared in a warm jacket, so perched on a rock with more of a vantage point, and sketched us!

I sketched the landmark Northcliff water tower, struggling with perspective again - although the top of the tower IS wider than the bottom, should I paint it so?... I thought not but should have - mine doesn't look much like the real thing - when John posts his version you'll see what it does look like! I spotted a little bit of Joburg skyline in between the long grass and somebody's eagle's eye home - what a place to live!

When our chattering teeth interfered too much with our sketching abilities, we decided to go back down to the suburbs and warm up over coffee and lunch at the Mugg & Bean. I faced the view that attracted me most - the display of yummy looking cakes and pies, managing to control my impulse to order one of each by drawing them instead.

Earlier in the week I had been painting a mural for the local primary school concert, as I mentioned before. I took a small break to sketch the children rehearsing below where I was on the stage, in the hall - very sweet but very lively and multitudinous!!

Glazed over

2011-09-22T13:35:00.000+02:00

I've been painting more, sketching less lately (as well as painting the backdrop for our local primary school's annual concert again, many years after my children left there and grew up) so another long absence here - I attended the final session of Greg Kerr's course I posted about here, last week after missing the third one while on my travels. This was about learning how to glaze with oil paints - the images gleaned from our original source material - mine being on 12"x12" canvases, my ladies with umbrella, black and white cow, wooden fence and seed pod, which I changed from a honey-locust to a jacaranda - an attempt at iconography, but too hard and complicated to explain!

One panel started with a bolus, or red oxide ground, the layers of warm and cool colours built up slowly and patiently, drying well between each one (hard for somebody used to instant results with pen and watercolour)

One on a white ground, where the layers produced much more brilliantly coloured results, and took a lot longer to get to neutral shades and depth of tone.

And on a green ground, which produced different results again of the layers of transparent colour - we were to lift out areas from each glaze to preserve colours we wanted to keep. The white crayon outline of the original drawing ended up as the 'radioactive' glow around the cow.

We finished the paintings off by adding veils of pure colour, and lastly, very sparingly, white. They are very dark, shiny (because of the Liquin used as medium) little paintings, hard to photograph, and I don't know if I would paint like this as a rule, but I'm very happy to know how to do it.
We worked on our three acrylic paintings too with oil glazes, tying them together as a triptych, lifting and knocking back, and I learnt another blending technique with the fan brush, which I've never quite known what to do with, to get a highly polished looking finish - still thinking about those. I feel, at last, as though I'm getting to know exactly what to do with the wonderful 40th birthday present my husband gave me mphwmph years ago of a bunch of oil paints, canvases and brushes!

Fast lines

2011-09-05T10:49:00.000+02:00

On Saturday our Joburg sketching group went to Brightwater Commons, a shopping complex with a big open air area with markets, exhibitions, children's playgrounds and a skateboard park. We decided to try and sketch the acrobatics of the skateboarders - what a challenge that turned out to be! These two sketches took me all afternoon - most of the time was spent staring at the flying figures, trying to work out which limbs went where, a mental 'snapshot' and then the quickest of lines to pin them down on paper.

I used my Lamy fountain pen, filled with the precious Noodlers Bulletproof black ink that Liz Steel very kindly brought all the way from Sydney to Lisbon for me, which allows watercolour washes over it without running into black and grey mess (though sometimes I enjoy that effect, so have other watersoluble pens in my kit). In the bottom sketch I added a second layer of figures over the black line ones, with another treasure bought in a Lisbon art shop - Prussian Blue Ecoline Liquid watercolour in my thin waterbrush - voila, no clogging! - its such a lovely drawing tool, especially for these fast flowing lines.

After Lisbon... France

2011-09-02T18:22:00.003+02:00

After the anticipation, preparation and high excitement of Lisbon, it was a different kind of joy to unwind in the northern French countryside of Pas de Calais. Our daughter and her boyfriend welcomed us to their lovely farmhouse home and we proceeded to enjoy all the charms of a tiny French village - from the noisy next-door rooster to the cow who craved human company, the visiting Dutch orchestra, the family jam-producing homestead, and the drives to surrounding Somme battlefields, village markets and sea and riverside towns, it was a feast of new, blissful and picturesque experiences. I would have to spend weeks, slowly, to sketch even a tenth of it, but this was a sociable, and mobile - lots more walking! - time with family and friends, so these were the few scenes I did get into my sketchbook. I hope to get the chance to do lots more some day.

Sitting on the doorstep of the house, looking out of the gate to 'The Cité' - all of ...six? houses in a row, with the cow's field behind them.

The gateway to The Abbaye, where we gathered one evening with the villagers to listen to the orchestra and choir from Holland - heralded by a march through the town with bagpipes (?!) and a very quaint sort of barrel orchestrion.

The garage housing a very old Landrover that valiantly transported its travellers most of the way round Europe, but depositing them rather suddenly near Barcelona, and needing to be towed back to its resting place under the grape vines.

Interludes and Airports

2011-08-28T12:02:00.001+02:00

I'm still depositing sketches from my trip while I'm catching up on other things at home, my neglected painting course and a little spring cleaning included...

We had to leave the Zambezi River a little earlier than the rest of our group so I could catch my flight to Paris and Lisbon. We first spent a night in Lusaka in the Ridgeway hotel which is managed by an old friend.

He kindly arranged for his driver to take us into town for the afternoon so we could look for some colourful local chitenge cloth to take to our daughter in France. Patrick waited patiently while I scribbled down a sketch of a little street scene, and then again at the curio village - after having been persuaded to buy some of their wares - a group of women who bead and sew and hope against hope that someone will come along to shop.

Early the next morning we caught our flight back to Johannesburg, where I had a swop of suitcases and a long wait for my flight to Paris.

Nothing like sketching to while away the time, I started on a long line of people sitting and waiting for our flight to be called, and came upon a woman who was... sketching me!! I thought she had to be going to the same symposium that I was, and when I finished, went over to ask her, but no, she was just passing the time.

One last airport scene in transit in Paris before the adventure in Lisbon began.

Before Lisbon... Zambia

2011-08-22T14:14:00.001+02:00

In complete contrast and as a gorgeous relaxed prelude to the busyness of the week in Lisbon, my husband and I were lucky enough to join my two sisters, their spouses and a group of friends, on an idyllic holiday on the Zambezi River in Zambia. I didn't do a lot of sketching - my few attempts at drawing the abundance of wildlife - lions, hippos galore, elephant and crocodiles, buffalo, impala and kudu were quickly abandoned as either they or the vehicle moved, or I was too entranced to take my eyes off them to reach for my sketchbook and brushes. These were some of the quiet moments I did manage to get down on paper...

A view from a pool deck at the lodge down the river.

Hippos grazed and grunted contentedly near the tented rooms - I sat on one of the patios and sketched them and a group of baboons picking at seeds on the mud flats - ready to run inside if they came any closer!

Boats took us to some watery by-ways, where scores of varieties of birds nested and fed, as well as some huge crocs and the ubiquitous hippos, the 'pigeons of the Zambezi'. I was grateful for the expert knowledge of the guides as to where to get out and stretch our legs! This was my husband, brother-in-law and his brother fishing for barbel. On another occasion, one of them had caught a fish from the boat and was reeling it in, when a croc shot up and took it, Matt finding himself with this huge toothy beast on the end of his line, a metre away - which fortunately turned and broke it before diving back into the deep.

Vincent, the fishing guide on this trip (my sketch doesn't look much like him, another moving target!), worked hard, baiting all the hooks and advising where to cast - he was extremely knowledgeable about the birds, trees, in fact all the flora and fauna, as were all the guides - getting a little time to fish himself in between work.

The bar hangs over the water and underneath a magnificent sausage tree, adorned with enormous sausage-shaped seedpods. It was a bit chilly in the evenings to make use of this beautiful sundowner area in July, two outdoor fireplaces inviting us to gather around and share every day's wealth of experiences.

The white fronted bee-eater, as my sister Vivienne noted, was the bird of the trip, there seemed to be one around or ahead of us, wherever any of us went, by foot or landrover. One of the guides said they try to lead people, or baboons to bee-hives, so that as you take the honey, they get the bees, wiping the stings out first on a rock - clever little creatures!

...and a jacana digging for food in the mud puddles.

On my last blissful day in the bush, we could choose to go down the river by boat cruise - which I did, having an unforgettable encounter with elephants along the way (photos below) - land vehicle, or canoe, all meeting at a spot on the river bank where a delicious picnic lunch had been prepared for us. I sketched the staff having a well-earned break before clearing up and getting us back via boat cruise or game drive for one last, perfect evening on the Zambezi.

After the Symposium

2011-08-13T13:49:00.000+02:00

With all the tantalising glimpses of everyone's sketchbooks and the huge array of styles from other fascinating sounding workshops milling around in my head - and my husband and son having joined me as the symposium drew to a close - we caught a train a little way down the coast to Estoril. We had no idea what to expect, just that it was close enough to Lisbon to go back and wander around some more if we liked (which we did). It turned out to be a very popular beach resort, as we started to suspect on the train ride with all the beach bags, umbrellas and brightly dressed co-passengers travelling with us.

I sketched this from our hotel window, with a mind on Melanie's workshop, not putting in all the details of the surroundings, but the simple story of a couple, on holiday at this seaside town where an old castle overlooks the bay

The next day we joined the throngs on the beach and I tried out my 'unschooled' version of Richard Camara's 'Lining over Colour' workshop. I think I overdid the random blobs of colour underpainting trying to portray the masses of bright umbrellas!

Then an interesting mixed media sketch - inadvertently including sunscreen and sand with the watercolour...

We caught the train back to Lisbon to do some more sight-seeing and tram-riding. Walking, trying to see as much as possible didn't leave much time for sketching, apart from a quickie of this brilliant green tiled building in the Rua do Secula, where we took a short break in the shade. The beautifully tiled buildings in Lisbon have to be seen to be believed - my daughter later asked if these tiles are really that colour... yes, as far as I can match it with paint, they are!

We came across a few stray symposium sketchers still scattered around the streets of Lisbon, working away at their sketchbooks and easels, including Marc Holmes. I had the chance to look over his shoulder at the wonderfully loose pencil linework he does before applying watercolour washes to his buildings - which inspired me to do this one when we were back on the beach the following day. I was really pleased and felt - just as it was time to move on - that I'd just begun to get into my sketching stride.

Stories of the Square and the 32nd Sketchcrawl

2011-08-11T17:44:00.000+02:00

On the second day I had the afternoon off, and could go to Melanie Reim's 'Stories of the Square' workshop. In this sketch I obeyed instructions, making the main characters large, and setting them in the Rossio square...(this one was sold at the 'silent auction' held to raise funds for next year's symposium)

....in this one I lost the plot and got distracted from my story by the pigeons.

These below were done at the 32nd Worldwide Sketchcrawl, when all the symposium participants, instructors and lecturers, as well as any Lisbonites who cared to join us, gathered in the Terreiro Do Paco, an enormous square on the final afternoon of the wonderful symposium. Truly amazing to be part of such a huge group, all sketching together.

two musicians, who moved on too quickly, so I turned to my fellow sketchers

A busker and his diabolo

I had to at least attempt some of the magnificent buildings and statues, but I could have done with some help from instructors such as Gerard Michel and Marc Holmes - wish I could have done every single one of the workshops!

The Urban Portraits workshops

2011-08-10T13:45:00.000+02:00

The beautiful Miradoura de S. Pedro de Alcântara where our workshop was based

Every morning and afternoon, each group gathered at the Faculty of Arts before walking to our designated sketching areas. Isabel and I had the one very furthest away from the school, up long hills on narrow pavements - talk about sketchercise! Our miradoura (viewing point) was magnificent, but tricky for our chosen theme of Urban Portraits - you could not ignore that view - so we asked our students to place their figures in Lisbon, by finding a way to simply indicate the surroundings, contrasting the bulk of the figures with the light and intricacy of the rooftops and details, and to experiment with a different method from their usual - if they always sketched in line, to use brush and wash alone, and if that was their normal medium, to try linework in as many people sketches as possible - showing a folder of sketches by well-known artists of the simple ways these could be used to indicate shape, form, movement and character.

Line drawings by Picasso and Feliks Topolski

Simple shapes describing form and movement by Degas and van Gogh

My introduction was rather bumbling on the first afternoon, a little more confident on the second day and by the third and last, I felt I almost knew what I was doing. Isabel joined in where necessary, adding and embellishing so I think the students had an idea of what we were after. Then off we went in different directions to find our subject matter, Isabel and I doing very quick sketches so we could get round to everyone and talk about what they were doing and any problems they were having. I really enjoyed this one-on-one interaction, and was where the many years of drawing, sketching, art classes, reading etc. finally came fairly effortlessly into action. As Isabel had predicted, the words came, I could see how to help, and hopefully did, for at least a few of the students. With a wide range of levels, from beginners to experts, there were many there that I would like to have taken lessons from!

The self-imposed pressure to produce 'good' sketches as examples, was slightly daunting, and I was definitely shaky, but everyone else was relaxed and didn't seem to expect masterpieces from me, luckily.

I was most happy with this one of a couple recovering from a night out, probably in Biarro Alto where the revelry carries on all night - they posed like this for a good long while!

...and Home Again

2011-08-08T11:29:00.000+02:00

I hardly know where to start telling you about the Symposium - from flying into Lisbon, metres above the terracotta rooftops, to the final farewell party in the by then familiar square of the Faculdade de Belas Artes -three and a half days of amazing, pinch me experiences.

Tia gave me an A++ for my sketch of her lecture
'From sketching together to a Group Exhibition'!

The first sighting of the legendary Tia and her husband Albert at the luggage carousel; being greeted by the enthusiastic waves and warm smiles of the Lisbon team come to meet us and take us to the Hotel Borges in the heart of old, historic, colourful, vibrant, bustling Lisbon... whoever would have thought mere sketches would have brought me to such a place and time, with so many people with a shared passion, so excited to meet each other?

The entrance to the Faculdade de Bel Artes of the University of Lisbon, the base of the Symposium

Photos I've seen around the internet - Asnee, Ea, Nina, Simonetta, Marc... more and more surreally familiar faces came into three-dimensional, animated life and the reality of this dream started to dawn.

I soon met my workshop partner and fellow African Urban Sketchers correspondent, Isabel Fiadeiro, who took me under her competent wing, explaining, encouraging, translating, calming my jitters about teaching for the first time, "when the time comes, the words will come, you will know what to say" - and so it proved to be.

And Gabi Campanario, the originator and powerhouse of it all, dealing graciously with every question and situation that arose, and the team of Portuguese hosts and volunteers, who must have worked themselves to a standstill to plan and organise the mammoth production of displays, lectures, workshop venues, every little detail thought of and taken care of for this enormous event, with unending good humour and hospitality.

Listening to Matt Brehm's lecture - one Liz Steel - at last we've
met for real!

I, like many of the instructors, didn't have time to do as many sketches as you'd think, as our focus was on guiding and teaching, which turned out be a richly rewarding experience. As Matthew Brehm said in one of the excellent lectures that were delivered every day after lunch, "teaching is a very aggressive form of learning", as I discovered both in the preparations leading up to the trip, and during the one-on-one sessions with the participants, of which more later.

These watercolour sketches were done on the first morning at the 'Waterscapes' workshop - more about it on the Symposium website - as my first teaching session was in the afternoon, a pleasant and relaxing way to lead into the packed days ahead.

Leaving on a jetplane...

2011-07-09T15:00:00.001+02:00

Random sketches while getting visas, vaccinations, hairdo's, shopping, etc.

My poor blog feels so neglected, it's run by a scatterbrain who can hardly walk and chew gum at the same time and who has had to plan, shop, clean, sew, prepare, pack, co-ordinate, think... oh all way beyond her capabilities. But with time, and help from my nearest and dearest, I am almost, almost ready to depart on Sunday for this long awaited trip. First a much needed and welcome break in the bush with beloved family, and then... a week later... the chance to meet and talk and sketch and teach and learn and interact with an enormous gathering of excited and exciting sketchers from all over the world - at the Urban Sketchers Symposium in Lisbon - I can't believe it's here at last after six months of anticipation. I don't have an iPad or laptop or Blackberry to report back as I go, but I'll be doing more sketching than ever before in my life... and will post as many as I can as soon as I can - we are spending a few more days in Portugal, looking around, and then visiting our daughter in France, so will be back in early August. Until then, adeus, tchau, até logo...

Just before I go... some sketches from last Saturday's Joburg Sketchers outing to the Bryanston Organic Market - first at one of the outdoor cafés, then the musicians at another. I bought some embroidery (which I scanned and added to my sketch) from Happy at her stall 'Out of Alex' - Alexandra being a large township nearby. I went back to the market a few days later, for some other things, and asked if I could sketch her, which she 'happily' agreed to. She insisted I put her stall number 22 in the sketch so that if any of you make your way to the Bryanston market, you be sure to go and say hello.

Sunday afternoon

2011-07-08T20:31:00.001+02:00

(I started this post a week or more ago and didn't get to send it - so dashing it off now before writing my final Pre-Symposium Post... eeeehhhh!!)

This was sketched some days ago at Emmarentia Dam. This tranquil looking scene was actually one of some drama, as a police van kept belting through, chasing the men on the ice cream carts, who aren't supposed to trade in the park (and are suspected of trading in less innocuous substances). Parents had to grab their children and stand back as the wild west show began, until calm returned - as did the icecream men, like pigeons to a public square - then the whole ritual repeated itself. Bizarre and dangerous, but curiously entertaining for a Sunday afternoon.

Italian Festival Sketchday

2011-06-20T18:27:00.001+02:00

It may look like four different artists did these sketches, but it was all me, trying out different ways to capture the fluid but fast-moving actions of the Flag Dancers that performed at the Italian Festival at Montecasino. Our group sketched there a few weeks ago, but we decided to go again on Saturday after hearing that these guys would be there, plus fashion shows, Italian cars and food. We started off at the food court, it was a bit early to indulge in the lasagnes and pastas, but I warmed up sketching some potential customers sitting nearby.

Then came the sound of drums beating and horns playing, so we rushed through to the Piazza in time to have sketchbooks at the ready for the colourful arrival of the Flag Throwers and Dancers. I tried first with a brushpen, and then to get some of the colours, with wax Mon Ami crayons which I washed over with watercolour later - the intention was better than the result of this experiment below!

So a return to my beautiful Pentel brush pen (see Rozworks review here) to catch the last drumrolls and trumpeting, then feeling quite wiped out after all the frantic sketching, to the coffee shop to relax with a more leisurely drawing of my fellow sketchers, Cathy and her son Lino, John and Barbara - Lorna had gone home by then but I guess I couldn't have squeezed another face in there!

Life snippets

2011-06-15T12:05:00.003+02:00

A rather nightmarish situation for one of my family, (causing the sleepless night of the previous post) and consequently for the rest of us ended up here last week. Thankfully it was swiftly dismissed by the state prosecutor, who agreed it should never have got there in the first place. I used water-soluble fountain pen and felt-tips for this messy sketch, a reflection of the way I was feeling perhaps!

Some quick outings with my husband in his car, looking for good sketching subjects to practise on - on the left a happy gathering of men outside our favourite Portuguese grocery shop on the other side of town - why all things Portuguese I wonder!? - chatting and waiting for their turn at the pavement barbershop.

And a day or two later a trip into town searching for a spare part for our ancient pressure cooker, I sat and sketched in the car just a tiny section of one of the many crowded streets where traders sell food, old shoes, new shoes, cellphones, clothing, appliances, haircuts and braiding - you name it, you'll find it if you can negotiate the packed pavements. The woman in the green apron was donning layers and layers of clothing - icy cold on the shady side of the street. As a final touch she wrapped a bright blanket round her waist and dashed across the road into a passing taxi, causing much screeching of brakes and hooting. Ten minutes later, she hopped off another returning taxi, back to her stand and carried on selling her wares. I guess she went to pick up some salt and pepper or something.

Thinking and planning

2011-06-13T14:16:00.002+02:00

I have been busy sketching, all the time analysing what I'm doing, how and why - to try to convey to others at the Symposium next month - but scanning and posting have fallen behind. I think from now I'm going to do less talking and hopefully more sketches! Here are some from the two Saturdays before last...

The Joburg sketchers met at Weltevreden Farm where I managed one page of elements of the Second Cup coffee shop and gardens (after a totally sleepless night and in freezing cold weather) The cuppacino, milk tart - impressively presented under a crown! - and company made the outing well worthwhile. Here are John's beautiful plein air painting from the day and Cathy's sketches, I haven't tracked down sketches from the other two participants - one all the way from Hong Kong!

The following Saturday I ventured into town to visit Walter and Albertina Sisulu's statue after MaSisulu passed away at 92 years old two days before. Someone had draped a blanket around her shoulders and placed flowers in her arms, and a little boy climbed onto Walter's lap while I drew, something the sculptor intended for her design to encourage.

I've made an insert for a bag to take to Lisbon with me - from some very lightweight 'parachute' fabric in which I sewed pockets for almost all my pens and brushes and wrapped around a thin plastic sheet (a chopping mat from the kitchen) to keep it stiff. After schlepping it around a bit, I'm thinking it's almost too much stuff to take with me. I suspect when frenetically sketching everything and everybody in sight, less may be better - but it does work well!

Another Workshop

2011-06-04T11:05:00.001+02:00

As if I'm not far enough behind already - our internet connection has been 'down' for the last four days. I did promise to report back on the other workshop I did the week after Easter - ages ago!

This was a 3 day watercolour workshop with Don Andrews, who came all the way from Alabama with his wife Martha for a family celebration, and was persuaded by Barbara, the chairman of our watercolour society at the time, to squeeze in a couple of workshops while they were here.

I had watched one of Don's DVD's and was fascinated at the way he layers wash upon wash to create richly coloured, granulated washes to enhance his figure studies. I'm not going to go into detail about his methods and excellent good-humoured advice on how to achieve a compelling and focused figure painting - but if I'd only remembered at the end all I'd been told from the beginning I may have produced better final results. The paintings just got worse and worse as I moved on to better and better paper.

We first tried the many colour washes onto wet paper, working from photographs for reference material, exciting to see the various colours and granulations that emerged. When those were dry, we went back in with dark shapes and washes, and were raring to go back the next day to apply this to painting from live models.

We first worked on cheap sketching paper to do some shadow painting, quickly putting down the shapes we saw on the strongly lit models, first in one colour only, then adding another. These quick exercises jumped off my brush in the loose spontaneous strokes I should have strived for later... (apologies for the bad photographs, these are all large A2 or bigger sheets, and very warped and wrinkled) ...a lesson to not fuss over initial facial features and shadow shapes, the two faces below left, were my favourite results of the week, and were done so quickly then left alone!

But as I pulled out my more precious sheets of paper - some of which have lain under my bed for far too many years, and got 'foxed', or lost their sizing -

I became progressively tighter and more precious with my brushstrokes until my final painting, which should have been the culmination of all the good advice and teachings of the week was just, well, ble-urgh. I also was getting very mean with the amount of pigment I was using in the washes and in retrospect, should have painted much smaller for these experiments. Don uses a lot of paint, buying large tubes of the American Journey range from Cheap Joe's, which he generously allowed us to play with. I haven't had a chance to go back and try this all again, but it's on my to-do list After Lisbon... which is coming up at great speed and for which I need to get back to sketching in earnest.

Resurfacing...

2011-05-17T14:45:00.002+02:00

It's been a long time! My apologies and thanks to all who have left comments over the last few posts, gone mostly unanswered, though not ignored - I have read and appreciated every one of them.

I thought this year would be a slow, relaxed stretch of time for sketching and painting, now that my son has finished school and no longer requires as much taxiing around and motherly ministrations (wrong about that too!), but it has spiralled into a maelstrom of activity. When I started this blog, it was partly to motivate myself to make art regularly - in that respect it has succeeded, and then some!

I mentioned some time ago that I registered for a year long course with artist and lecturer Greg Kerr. Four sessions of four days each, spread over the year with the surprise addition of plenty of homework in between. We're half way through that now, having just completed the second session.

The first entailed preparation of sourcing our own images through a programme that Greg and other university lecturers developed called 'The Dark Cloud', from which we made large charcoal triptychs.

Each panel is a full sheet - of Arches hot press 300gsm in my case - at the moment being displayed in the David Brown Gallery in Nelson Mandela Square in Sandton with eleven other student's work - a credit to Greg's teaching that all the work is so different, individual and good! It was chosen not on any merit system but merely those who had finished and submitted in time.

For homework we had to make 24 very small images from cropped sections from the source material photographs - I still have 6 to go (relieved to find we weren't in for detention or a rap on the knuckles for non-completion!)

These are on A6 sheets of Fabriano, with the images 120x85mm, and are meant to force the charcoal to be as photographic in nature as possible. When all are done, to be bound into a book form.

In the second session we took three of these tiny images and blew them up to large canvas size to make tonal studies in acrylic paint, with added interest of thin coloured edges - I left some areas of the canvas showing the coloured underpainting, with lots more thinking and work still to be done on them - very much work in progress.

I began the first full-tonal range panel on a big canvas - 1000x800mm but switched to smaller 550x750mm ones for the high and dark toned ones after I'd spent the first day filling in between the lines. Not sure where these are going yet, but I have no doubt there will be surprises in store the next time we get together in August for oil painting.

A big advantage of a course spread out like this over a period is that you learn to live with your work, think about and develop it, as well as the discipline of returning to it - to become a habit by the end of the course, instead of the workshop becoming a pleasant, but dim and distant memory - at least that is what I hope happens.

But wait, that's not all I've been doing! In between this was another short watercolour workshop that I'll write about soon, the Urban Sketcher's Symposium rushing up and needing attention - some preparation under my belt but lots more to do - a workshop that I've just given on sketchbooks and art journals, the lovely postcard exchange which deserves more time and effort... how did this all land up in the same year, I'm sure it could keep me going for five!

Montecasino SketchCrawl

2011-04-21T15:34:00.000+02:00

These sketches are from last week's World Wide SketchCrawl day. I got home after it to find our computer had been attacked by a virus that removed everything off my desktop, plus access to all programs, and so the delay - though I'm also buzzing around trying to keep up with 101 projects which I'll blog about sooner or later. When is life going to calm down?!

We met at the big entertainment complex, Montecasino, which is styled along the lines of various Italian cities, I believe (thanks to Robyn for that info!), sketchbuddy John and I tackled this outside facade last thing on the wet, dismal day, and I added watercolour at home as the cold was getting to our bones.

This was my first stop - the six of us split up as we had been warned that the management wasn't too sketcher-friendly, quite excited to be intrepid guerilla sketchers, but as it turned out no one took the least bit of notice of us. I leant on the wall surrounding the flashing lights and bells of the casino, fascinated at the single-mindedness of the gamblers as they fixated on the machines in front of them - almost bit off more than I could chew and came away from there after a couple of hours with a throbbing headache!

After lunch and a look at everyone's drawings, John and I went over to the movie theatres to gather some more people practice - and an indulgent ice cream sundae as we had to sit at the ice cream parlour to get the best view, yes definitely the best view from there!

I'd had my eye on this balloon man all day, but he'd been a moving target selling his wares from one end of the centre to the other. At last I found him in a spot where he had run out of steam and stood still for a good long spell, letting his customers come to him, as this small girl happily did just when I was ready to add something to the drawing. The mom wasn't actually her mom, but she'll do for this purpose. The Carioca children's felt pens I used behaved completely differently on moleskine paper, not blending at all with water - in the first casino sketch they were completely soluble!

Quiet Monday morning

2011-04-12T20:17:00.000+02:00

A quick sketch I did yesterday after shopping for spring bulbs... one good thing about winter being on its way, is that spring and all its joys will follow. After a week of busyness at home I went looking for more people to sketch, but they were hard to find on a Monday morning. Even Zoo Lake, which is usually buzzing with activity, was slow and sleepy, as demonstrated by the guy on the bench there (I know that physiology is weird, but thats how he looked from where I was sitting!). A young family wandered past and a couple of others, but by then I had already filled in the background, so for now, thats it!

People who sketch People

2011-04-05T13:46:00.000+02:00

After creatures at the zoo, I've been back looking at and sketching people, wherever I've been, sometimes making the effort going out specially to find some - brush people, pen people, pen and wash people, water-soluble people.

I often seriously doubt my ability to render them while I'm at it, but usually at some stage after the sketch is done, I'll recognise something of what I was trying to capture, and forgive myself my shortcomings.

I often wonder while I'm sketching, if I am in fact enjoying myself - that only seems to happen after the session is over and I look at the sketches, and think... that was fun... wasn't it? It can be a bit of a panic, thinking its just not happening at all. And then it has, I (sometimes) realise later.

But not always, then I fiddle and faddle and add more colour or thicker lines until its thoroughly overworked and I'm fed up with it like this one...

Occasionally I'll see someone who really appeals to me, because of their clothes, or posture or attitude and rush down a few mad strokes and something good just happens - that woman in the red dress and white hat (top right) for instance - and I think finally I'm getting somewhere, that's how I want to sketch.

Then the next time I try, and am disappointed again but leave it just as it is and much later perhaps, oh well, maybe not as bad as I thought...

...it's a roller-coaster isn't it?!

Creatures Great and Small

2011-03-27T08:52:00.002+02:00

A day at the Zoo for our sketch group yesterday, always a visual feast, though most of the models will not hold still for even a moment. I spent too long walking around deciding where to start but at last, sat in front of the hippos and in a bit of a flap, pulled out my watercolours and began with all the wrong colours. Close to me were a peacock and two guineafowl having a non-stop go, taking turns to peck and harass each other. I felt like going over to sort it out, but I guess that's how they spend their days, with or without me....

Then across the path to some brilliantly coloured birds, but first there was a sweet cockatoo gazing at me with fascination, and seemingly posing on the bars, even starting a conversation with a gruff hello (must have been someone's pet), so I drew him with my brushpen and a touch of colour. On to the the luminescently orange Scarlet Ibises - no ways could I get that colour on paper - then the elephants, who though they seem to move slowly, can one minute be right in front of you, and the next are small grey lumps on the horizon, so I didn't get very far with them.

A break for lunch with the group and a look at what everyone else had been doing - one of these days we'll get a Joburg Sketchers blog going - then a couple of us wandered down to the apes. Most of the cages were unoccupied for some reason, but we found the enormous Gorilla being fed his lunch. This was one guy who just tugged at my heartstrings, in his large but lonely enclosure. He should be in the rainforests of Central Africa, perhaps if he were, he would've been bushmeat by now... but I don't think he realises his luck.

And lastly, the lemurs, engaging and paintable though endlessly active creatures. They've obviously featured in a movie lately as many of the children who saw them rushed up to them in delight yelling something about King Julian..? Well I've just looked it up and it was 'Madagascar' - I'm sadly behind on animated movies now that my kids have grown up (though my 19 year-old did come to Toy Story 3 with me!)

Sketchy People

2011-03-13T17:25:00.003+02:00

Thought it's time I practice some fast people-sketching, while trying to take note of how I do it, so that I can pass on some tips to those who will be joining me in Lisbon at the Urban Sketcher's Symposium. I was very happy to hear that we will be paired with a Portuguese speaking person who knows Lisbon well - and that my person is Isabel Fiadeiro, the other out-of-Africa (though far away from here) USk correspondent, who already feels like a friend, and who also knows the ropes of a symposium from last year's in Portland.

Yesterday four of us went to Rosebank's Zone II, a new pedestrian mall to find some shoppers and al fresco action. I decided to restrict myself to a black water-soluble Pentel Signpen with waterbrush for quick tonal values and to try and fit in lots of loose-ish sketches.

I attracted two chatty onlookers, both very interested and interesting, so I ended up not doing as many sketches as I'd planned to, but had good practice in trying to talk and draw at the same time, something my left and right brains don't usually co-operate on too well.

I must say when I look back at when I started urban sketching and how nervous, to the point of shaking, I got at the prospect of being spotted while trying to sketch people 'live', I've come a long way! There are still some who are patently uncomfortable being observed and sketched, and others who are delighted and even pose, but I've learnt to remove myself from their reactions, unless I suppose they come over and ask me to stop, I carry on regardless...

At times, while I was drawing these sunny carefree scenes, I tried to imagine an enormous, catastrophic, unspeakable event descending over our lives as has happened in Japan - beyond imagination and my thoughts and prayers go out constantly to everyone affected.

Liebermann's Pottery

2011-03-06T16:46:00.001+02:00

Joburg Sketchers is growing! On Saturday we had a great sketch-out at Liebermann's Pottery, which is on the grounds of the Old Gasworks which I've sketched before, from a distance.

What a rich treasure house of sketching material - the ugly/beautiful old brick and corrugated-iron buildings of the abandoned gasworks, with networks of chutes and pylons, and machinery whose purpose is now a mystery. We were strictly forbidden to enter the demolition site, as they called it - sincerely hope nobody is planning to demolish this amazing part of our history - as there were reportedly pools of acid and a 'trigger-happy security guard' on the premises...okayyy! And of course there were pots and ceramics galore with various oddities and knick-knacks interspersed. I spent most of the time on the top sketch of the back of the pottery. As I was about to leave I spotted Cathy Giordano still working away in the front, so I joined her for another quick sketch of statues and pots. Suddenly a furious looking raggedy head popped out from between the pots, on the end of a skinny bare red neck. My first thought was "hey, I know you, guy!", then remembered I'd seen him on the 2summers blog I mentioned in my last post.

Sketchbooks of the other participants of the sketching trip - one was missing
amongst the pots.

He and his little hen-friend obviously spend their days foraging among the pots and I think belong to the night watchman who lives there. Their diet must be a bit lacking in feather-producing nutrients, unless they express their affection for each other by plucking each other - a new spin on the word necking! Catching his quick outline made my day.

Little Ethiopia

2011-03-01T14:06:00.001+02:00

I sketched these last Saturday - not keeping up with so much lately! - I joined a facebook group called Ancient Secrets on a tour into the inner city, where I would never have dared go on my own. Getting there was hair-raising - my poor husband, who was coming along, was so rattled after inching through solid jammed traffic and dodging minibus taxis who are adept and ruthless about forging forth regardless, that he dropped me near the meeting point and went back to the 'burbs for a haircut and a nice Indian head massage. The tour group wiggled our way through pavements packed with traders, shoppers, informal hair salons, blaring music and the teeming taxi brigade, attracting some amused looks and teasing comments (another occasion where I wished I could become the Invisible Sketcher and just sit and draw the amazing life around me) to a doorway which led us into the world of Ethiopia in Johannesburg. I wrote more about it here on Urban Sketchers, and there is a great account of the day here on a blog called 2summers.

A Sketch and a Symposium

2011-02-23T16:15:00.000+02:00

On Saturday almost two weeks ago (already!) we had a sketch day at Norscot Manor, a recreation centre which houses the Watercolour Society of South Africa. There was a wonderful demo first of wild and free watercolour by Angela Eidelman, and then some of us scattered ourselves around the grounds to sketch. I think a few people were expecting a sketching lesson too, which I wasn't prepared for, but think that will happen sometime soon. I need to practice... see why below...!

Though I did too much talking and not a lot of sketching, it was lovely to meet some new potential Joburg sketchers and a blogging virtual friend, Cathy of C comme... her descriptive version of the afternoon and sketching experience is here. I did a hasty, rough sketch while sitting chatting at the restaurant. Only once most people had left did I sit in the green shade and sketch the scene above - putting everything in, homestead, arch, pergola, palm, oak, bench, birdbath and koi pond... I must learn to edit my sketches!

Now for the need to practice... because I have... been invited... to go to the Urban Sketchers Symposium in Lisbon, as one of the international instructors, would you believe!! I am beside myself not only with excitement, but a large dose of nerves. I was hoping to go to the symposium, as a student not a teacher, knowing there is so much I need to learn about sketching cities and architecture, and to be on the other side of the lectern so to speak, is something new and well, gobsmacking. But it will be fantastic, and there will be help and support and camaraderie, and I hope I'll meet some of you there.
To Gabi Campanario and his Lisbon Urban Sketchers team, thank you so much!

A Week of Hard Work

2011-02-14T13:49:00.000+02:00

I was utterly exhausted at the end of an intense four day's looking, drawing and looking and drawing some more - but so satisfying to spend 8 hours, with a lunch break in between, not thinking of anything but how to achieve that tone and that particular shape or texture in charcoal. The first session of the year's course went by quickly after lots of preparation and worrying over whether I was doing the 'right' thing. Luckily, there was no right thing, just your thing, as the variety of very different work that the students produced proved. On the last day I grabbed a few minutes to scribble a sketch of the classroom with some of the new artist friends I met there.

Good Hair Day

2011-02-06T15:32:00.000+02:00

For sketching that is... not so much my hair, which has given me angst since the time in Kindergarten 1 when we were having our first school photos taken and the teacher tossed her brush in despair after attempts to neaten my flyaway locks. Though I did get a pretty good haircut, considering, on this visit to the hairdresser, where I used the time with foil and potions in my hair to sketch the heads around me. Lebo, my stylist knew I was sketching the girl next to me with her shining, lustrous mane, from her reflection in the mirror, but was so engrossed in what she was doing, didn't notice me drawing her too, superimposed on the other sketch.

After turning the page to start on something else, she asked if I could draw her and I showed her that I'd done so already (top left). She was surprised and thrilled and had to show it everyone in the salon! The sketch on the left was done out of the corner of my eye while hovering awkwardly backwards over the basin.
Later at home my daughter popped in to show us her new 'do' - she'd described it as mostly chopped off and cherry-red, but there is still plenty of hair left and I'd describe it more as a deep burgundy, which I tried to render with burnt sienna, alizarin crimson and sepia.

I'm starting my big drawing/painting course tomorrow - have done lots of preparation and am expecting a hard week's work.

Memory Bank

2011-01-31T20:27:00.001+02:00

I didn't mean to spend Friday cleaning out the paper drawers in my studio, but our dear old weimeraner dog, newly deaf but still with a finely tuned nose, had inspected them and smelt a rat, literally.

He started digging and scrabbling, pulling out the bottom drawers with precious sheets of watercolour paper stashed in them and no amount of yelling (he didn't hear a thing) or pulling would deter him. I had no choice but to remove the drawers one by one until he could fit his elderly frame into the space and at last emerge with one scrap of a mouse's Fabriano bed delicately held between his front teeth. I should be grateful... and I am, but it was the start of a long nostalgic graft sorting through 'stuff' from the seventies, eighties and upwards that I'd promised myself I'd get to one day. I've put it all back - with a potion of spices to deter rodents in case the dog didn't terrify her quite enough - you'd think in a way that I could find everything easily again, but no, I have no idea. I found so many memories, sketched, scribbled and painstakingly illustrated, one or two of which I thought I might post here, but I can't find them. I found this ultra quick NeocolorII scribble of our daughter today though, sitting on the couch with her school 'fish' art project in front of her that brings back such a strong memory of a slow, sunny afternoon - one of the few she wasn't off doing... something. Perhaps not my finest sketching half-hour but don't you love it when a few minutes with a crayon/pencil/brush long ago brings back so much?

Sketches on the Move

2011-01-24T16:31:00.000+02:00

You may have read by now this post on Katherine Tyrrell's Making a Mark about the new blog A Postcard From My Walk, where a group of us sketching, exercising people a.k.a. Sketchercisers are going to be showing the postcards we'll be sending each other every month over the next year or so. Hand-made, sketched postcards of course. These samples are just me experimenting on different types of card and paper, and trying to sketch smaller - I tend to overflow my boundaries and this small format is quite a challenge. The postcards themselves will remain a secret until we spot an exciting little rectangle in our letterboxes. Let's hope they all get here, and there, safely! I was quite concerned about them staying clean and pristine, but Albrecht Rissler (see his mailart section!) showed us some of his postcard collection, and the stamps, postmarks, wear and tear just add to them, and show the journey they've been on. Watercolours probably need an envelope for protection from rain and snow, but otherwise, anything goes. I'm so looking forward to checking my post box over the next months, I'll probably be getting quite a bit of exercise just doing that!

Splashy flowers

2011-01-11T19:34:00.000+02:00

I've been walking and driving past clouds of agapanthus for weeks now on everybody's pavement and curb - in this second half of summer they are starting to go to seed so I finally put idle thought into action and tried to sketch them. I started by dropping blobs of paint from a height onto the paper (I had to work on two at the same time as I've got so impatient with waiting for paint to dry - one in a sketchbook and the other on Fabriano). The drops give a good round shape and a nice sparkly look, but not enough variation of tone. I added some more highlights with a Tippex pen, definitely not good watercolour practice!

Happy, Bright New Year!

2011-01-01T14:15:00.000+02:00

Just as I suspected... I sketched these day lilies in our garden for New Year last year too - they're about all that are flowering at this green, green time of year. Painted very messily and feeling out of watercolour practice, they do come with my very best wishes for a 2011 that brings you everything that you'd wish for yourselves and your loved ones. May it be a richly satisfying creative year!
I haven't made any hard and fast plans, I am doing an oil painting course that spans the year in four sessions, though I don't think I'll be blogging about it, because of copyright clauses on the course material, but also because I want to just do the work without talking too much about it or seeking advice or your valued comments this time - maybe at the end of it I'll show the results. It may mean fewer (even less!) blog posts, but I want to try and keep the blog true to it's name, just sketching, when I can. One plan that did come about in 2010 was finding a couple of like-minded sketchers to join me on expeditions, which will help me get out of my comfy cocoon and into the world.
Thank you to all my visitors, and the lovely friends I've made here, for your feedback and time. As with some other bloggers, I have been posting and commenting less, not due to lack of interest but just trying to juggle a way to spend less time on the computer and more in the studio, or out sketching. For some reason it takes me an inordinately long time to compose blog posts and comments - my muddled brain battling to sort thoughts and words into a legible state, so I might be writing less to go with the pictures... if I remember... I can also babble on regardless, which I'm doing right now. So without further ado, HAPPY NEW YEAR, let's get going!!!

Angels for the Season

2010-12-21T18:43:00.000+02:00

As I thought, I haven't done much since last time and am unlikely to do much before Christmas (still got most of my shopping to do!) so I'll just post the mosaic

angels I sketched at Zoo Lake last week - bringing my best wishes for a very Happy Christmas to those who celebrate it, and for a wonderful holiday season with friends and family to everyone.
The angels, in the grounds of moyo restaurant at Zoo Lake are bigger than life-size (if angels have a life-size? Bigger than people size anyway!) and sort of hidden in the foliage so you only realise they're there quite slowly unless you know - quite a lovely if eerie sensation of being watched. It takes even longer to spot the cement frogs sitting smiling at you in the foreground, I think if I hadn't been drawing I would have missed them!

Zoo Lake

2010-12-12T17:34:00.000+02:00

Four of us went sketching yesterday at Zoo Lake,

a lively place to go on a Saturday. Moyo restaurant where I've sketched before was abuzz with customers, but we started on a quiet balcony overlooking a solitary woman working on her laptop amongst the treetops - she was the unwitting model for a couple of us - my daughter included, who I was delighted to have with us. I sketched the same mosaic angels that I've done before, but I think I might save them for a Christmas post a bit later in case I don't get anything else done. I then wandered around until I found where the others had got to - Barbara was busy drawing these guys selling wire bicycles and xylophones but they had tired of posing by then and I had to scribble them down fast. We went down to the water's edge and sketched the ice cream man and his bell ringer, after which I felt quite sketched out and went home - lots more subject matter down there for another trip!

Here are my daughter Alex's sketches of the laptop lady, a wooden fish and a metal sculpture...

A Horror Story (true)

2010-12-01T17:58:00.000+02:00

Let me introduce you to one of Joburg's creepier residents. The King Cricket, I believe originally a native of New Zealand that snuck into the country in a consignment of building sand, made itself at home and multiplied, greatly. It first reared its nodding little head in numbers in a suburb called Parktown, hence it's local name, the Parktown Prawn. This guy, the first I've seen now for some years, I found yesterday drowned in our swimming pool, a much more appealing discovery than some of the places P.P's have cropped up in days gone by.

In our previous house, we suffered a plague of them. They appeared climbing up curtains, grinding along your pillow, in every corner of every room, and worst of all, the telltale brown whiskers - if you were lucky - waved at you from under the rim of the toilet, warning you not to take that particular seat at that time. The shreiks and squeals they generated were quite out of proportion to their size, though their size, for an insect, is enormous - a bit bigger than how they appear on this page. The thought of their heavy, spiney bodies near your hair or neck or children was too awful to contemplate and the rasping military sound they made as they marched across the carpet could wake me from the deepest sleep to save my family from the beast.

A delightful trait it has when you try to corner or capture it, as soon as it becomes aware of your intentions, is to leap lumpily about, usually in your general direction and squirt a stream of foul-smelling black liquid from its rear end. The only way to catch it is to creep up from behind and grab one of its back legs - we had a special pair of long 'Prawn Tongs' for this purpose - which it somehow seemed oblivious to as you carried it gingerly to the loo and made triply sure it was well and truly flushed away - with a dose of Harpic for good measure.

The good news is, that just when we and all of Joburg were reaching hysteria about the Prawn problem, along came the Hadeda Ibises, flying in like avenging angels from the Eastern Cape. They found the P.P's delectable and gobbled and gobbled until now - a hapless prawn in the swimming pool is an oddity and becomes the subject of some detached sketching and reminiscing. Thank you dear big birds, your 4.30am siren call is forgiven.

Happy Thanksgiving

2010-11-25T10:43:00.000+02:00

...to my dear American family, and friends, many of whom I've made through this virtual window to the world, and viewers known and unknown - though we don't formally celebrate, I am thankful for you all. I have to confess to being relieved that I don't have to produce a large meal with pumpkin pie, when major festivities are coming up in a months time, but I am extraordinarily thankful for my husband (who would probably have to cook the Thanksgiving meal if truth be told), family and friends here at home, and those that soon will be home again.
The watercolour is one I did years ago from a photograph of my daughters at a funfair (the blond one at the back is returning home from seeing the world in less than a week - whee!) and wasn't very pleased with at the time - the painting that is, not the daughter - but now I've unearthed it again, it brings warm, happy feelings of nostalgia, and gratitude that these little girls have grown up into the wonderful independent young women they are. Their little brother wasn't born yet when this was taken, but I think I feel a blog post of his own coming on, as he moves from one life stage into another and my maternal role goes through churnings and adjustments.

Back to the River

2010-11-20T23:08:00.000+02:00

Got the watercolours out this morning to go and join my sketching buddy, John, at Emmarentia Dam - we continue to hope other enthusiastic sketchers will expand our little band, but so far it's a slow process finding them. We sat in a dry part of the river bed and painted this woodlandsy scene. The sun kept disappearing behind clouds, changing the light and reflections completely. I so want to learn to paint water and reflections, and they are so difficult! The yellow parts in the water are greener in the actual sketch - reflecting the trees behind, it looks a bit sickly in this scan. Actually it didn't smell too great either, recent rains must have washed down some muck from upstream, but I'm sure you'd rather not know that!

Drawing course Day Two

2010-11-15T12:12:00.000+02:00

Actually I can't remember exactly what we did on each separate day - I think we did some warming up quick exercises on the second day too, but the main object was to take some of the previous days 'sensual' drawings and work new drawings over them, not obliterating them, but trying to have some new feeling or meaning emerge from superimposing images - I'm not at all doing justice to Hermine's urging us out of the usual or the safe, she had us each enthralled in our own individual and different journeys of discovery. This time she had made a doll out of clothes, blankets, buttons and string, as a prop to the model, which in some of my drawings manifested as a rather sinister and ghostly voyeur.

For our final drawings we were to use all the materials we'd brought as we liked, which were many and varied - and combine everything we'd learnt to create a composition. Not the most attractive result here, though Hermine kindly called it 'stone-like', I used an old chewed foam roller to draw out the figure, which made her look a bit like some of us post-course students (one artist was so coated in charcoal and ink you could hardly make out her features - wish I'd taken a photo!) and added powdered graphite and glue, charcoal and ink, and stuck on some textured paper - didn't get to the candle wax, sandpaper and crayons!

Drawing course Day One

2010-11-12T15:19:00.000+02:00

I mentioned a drawing workshop I went on in October a couple of posts ago - I have only now got to photographing the results, and am glad to recall it before it disappears into the dim dusty recesses of my mind. It was an intense two day course devised by a fabulous artist and teacher, Hermine Spies Coleman, called 'Drawing with all of your senses'. I'm not going to go into too much detail, but we had to bring a wide variety of drawing materials, scented things, music, and food (lunch!) We had a young newbie model not comfortable with disrobing completely, to work from, though formal life drawing wasn't the object so it didn't really matter.

The first exercises were using a soft powdery medium like charcoal dust or powdered graphite, dipping our fingers into it and 'feeling the drawing' directly onto the paper. We then added glue or water to make a creamy mixture and continued the sensual experience of building the images with our hands - I was frustrated with how difficult it was to get the glue and graphite to do what I wanted it to, but persevered rather irritably rubbing from side to side to get the pigment to stick the paper, and was surprised and pleased to step back and find an interesting, evocative image (right) had resulted, as if she's in or made of water.

I have to admit to getting very bored with much of my life drawing last time I was doing it regularly, and this course forced me to leave my comfort zone and discover new ways of mark making and unexpected solutions to problems - and excitement. They may posssibly not appeal to many viewers who like their life drawing conventional, but I was happy to launch into fresh directions, and as I relive the workshop, am excited again to get back to the drawing board, the sooner the better.

We did a series of short exercises - drawing with our eyes on the

model only, not looking down at the paper, looking at short poses and then closing our eyes to draw them quickly and succinctly, drawing to music, trying to put the music into the marks and then drawing the model dancing to the music - a huge amount of concentration and being in the moment. The afternoon session saw us all exhausted, and returning to our old tried and tired drawing styles...

Peepo!

2010-11-09T09:58:00.000+02:00

I haven't slipped off the edge of the world - just emerging from a too time intensive fund-raising project in between a stack of deadlines for something exciting that I don't think I'm supposed to mention yet. Drawing, paints, brushes, paper, canvas, seem like a dim, distant happy memory as do gentle days of blogging, visiting and commenting.

I thought I'd do a Christmas stall at my church's Arts & Crafts Day, after finding that paintings weren't really a viable seller with that particular marketplace, but boy, I wasn't prepared for the commitment of time, money and energy that filling a little table with angels and mangers, gingerbread men and Christmas stockings, candles and biscuits would entail. About half way through I was telling myself firmly - never again! I have to figure out a better way of raising funds creatively, or else just hand over the cheque that would go into raw materials and save on the weeks of slog - it would have meant more money for them!

Here are some of the angels and nativity scenes made from jacaranda pods - they all sold out and though the heads with hair and headresses were fiddly, quite fun to make, and could be worthwhile in an organised production line. They emerge with their own little characters and caused such delight that I got over my mutters about how long they took and happily sent them off to their new homes.

Sketchcrawl #29

2010-10-17T19:25:00.000+02:00

Yesterday our fledgling Joburg Sketchers group went to the Museum of Military History (aka the War Museum) for the 29th International Sketchcrawl. A boy sketcher's paradise, but a challenge for the less mechanically minded. First I tried the actual War Memorial from a close-up angle - hence stiff neck muscles today and proof that my perspective skills need serious work, then the angel on the top - somebody said it's called a 'nike', which I must look up when I have time. I have no time! At last I realised I couldn't escape, I had to draw a mechanical thing - a big gun - interesting how all the bits fit together when you start drawing at one end and work your way to the other. You can see the other Joburg sketchers work here on the Sketchcrawl site.
I spent Thursday and Friday at a wonderful drawing workshop, but the reporting of it and photographing the results is going to take a while, and life has got hectic again - hope to get to it soon.

A Family Wedding

2010-10-09T21:28:00.000+02:00

At last, sketches of my niece's wedding in England in May. In the comments in my previous post about sketching at weddings, I said how much harder it is when you have an emotional involvement, when you're trying too hard, and when you're a guest and not just an onlooker. The wedding, the bride, the setting, were all so incredibly beautiful that I really couldn't do them justice, but as a memento - to dearest Jo and Steve, this comes with love and best wishes for a wonderful future...
(I added the text for this Issuu publication as a brief explaination and link between the drawings)

Weddings in the Park

2010-10-05T09:40:00.000+02:00

Suddenly, summer! On Saturday we had an early morning walk through the botanical gardens and I just had to go back later to sketch all the spring pinks and greens - by which time it was 30°C and the peach trees looked like they were shedding their blossoms for protective leaves almost as I watched. As I sat on a wall in the shade, wedding party after wedding party came traipsing past for their photo shoots. The ice cream men on their bicycles seemed to play quite a role in the entourages - I'd hear the bell tinkling, then came the bridal group with guests over the horizon, then photographs, one with the bride and groom even perched on the ice cream cart!

These two elderly women collapsed gratefully in the shade for a few minutes before once again following the tinkly bell, and this matron-of-honour stopped to check her messages, or perhaps a quick Twitter before going back to the business of waiting on the bride. I do love being this fly on the wall in the guise of sketcher, my lifelong interest in people-watching indulged as I practice drawing!

A little wisteria

2010-09-29T11:46:00.000+02:00

That sounds like a cross between wistfulness and hysteria, kind of how I'm feeling!... life full of distractions and obligations, so little time for painting - last weekend I was supposed to join our fledgling sketchers group and go sketching at a big gardening centre, but was slain by a stomach bug that started on Wednesday and carried on wracking my innards for the next five days. Ugh - anyway, better now but only have this sketch of my lovely new wisteria that I planted last year and which greeted us with scented blossom and bumble bees when we got home from our trip away. I have been warned and reminded by friends that they can run rampant and take over garden, eaves and countryside, but I'm hoping to train this beauty to just shade and decorate my studio doorway.

Rhino Day

2010-09-22T14:13:00.000+02:00

Today is World Rhino Day. Here in South Africa we have as a nation, been horrified by the increased wholesale slaughter of these creatures for their horns - a chunk of keratin, no more, no less - over recent years. This year alone 210 of them have been poached and the population has declined by 90% since 1970. I was in Zambia five years ago where we saw the very last white rhino left in the country, being followed at a distance by his personal armed bodyguard to try and protect him. I wonder if he's still alive? Game rangers and conservationists have resorted to removing the horns to try and prevent their destruction, but the animals are often still shot for the stump that has to remain intact for them to survive. In some cultures it is believed that the horn has medicinal properties as a cure for cancer, and as an aphrodisiac.

A brave oncologist in Malaysia has recently spoken out against this myth - as he says, you may as well chew your fingernails...

The good news is that this week police have arrested eleven people, including two vets, two safari operators and a professional hunter whom they believe to be kingpins in a rhino poaching syndicate that has been relentless and professional in their killing, with more arrests on the cards. But as long as the demand continues, somebody else will doubtless step in.

Thanks for reading - not sure what good it will do, but the more aware people are I'm sure, the better.

Here is a link to an article about who uses rhino horn and for what purposes.

The Snoek Run

2010-09-17T17:03:00.000+02:00

My other two sketches from our drive around the Cape peninsula last week - we stopped at Miller's Point to watch the snoek boats coming in with their bountiful catches - good to know there still are sometimes bountiful catches to be had for these fishermen. Apparently snoek is nomadic and grows fast, so is resilient to trawlers and other dangers of the deep.

When there's a 'snoek run' the fishing harbours leap into life, as they did on this day. I could have sketched in Kalk Bay harbour for hours (these are sketches done there last year) - the great characters, throwing fish around, cleaning, filleting, shouting, (the language is as blue as the sea and sky) selling, seagulls and seals milling round snatching at morsels tossed aside - but had to settle for a sketch from 'Kalkies' café where we enjoyed a delicious meal of, naturally, fresh snoek.

I have a feeling that if I did sketch the people there might be a 'fee' asked, as for everything else including chatting to this little boy who was playing with the seals with a bag on a rope so we could get photos!

I posted these two sketches on Urban Sketchers as the original line drawings... I have an almost uncontrollable urge to 'colour-in' later, and often wonder if they would be better just left as they were.

Katherine asked how I carry all my supplies, which at the moment is in a big squarish handbag, with the pens and waterbrush standing upright in a side pocket, and sketchbook all easy to whip out. I don't often have the time and space to add colour on site, though I always have a little Cotman palette in my bag in case. If I'm really hell-bent on a few hours solid sketching I take a simple school backpack with more paints and brushes, small water jars, cloths, a mixing palette and maybe some nicer watercolour paper folded into an accordian sketchbook, and sometimes a little folding stool. My latest sketchbook is a square 'Seawhite of Brighton' one from London Graphic Center - it was a moleskine until recently. Neither perfect for 'good' watercolour technique, but the paper holds up well to a bit of washing and scrubbing. I'll take a picture soon. This all undergoes constant review, so any tips for more efficient sketching are welcome.

Coastal Delights

2010-09-16T14:20:00.000+02:00

Continuing with our trip to the Cape, our next stop was the seaside town of Hermanus, where my family spent many happy holidays when my grandparents lived there, long long ago. If there's anywhere I'd love to paint in perfect sunshiny vividness, it would be Hermanus - to try and convey the way my heartstrings tugged around every corner, changed though it is from the village my sisters and I roamed freely as small girls. But the only sketch I did during a languorous fresh-fish lunch on the rocks (how this restaurant got permission to build themselves right ON the rocks I don't know!) was the feeble attempt below. I was too busy enjoying watching the whales frollicking in Walker Bay and chatting to one of those sisters and her husband as we reunited from our separate continents for a couple of days. The sketch is of the Whale Crier - a man whose job it is to alert tourists to the presence of whales in the bay by blowing his kelp horn. The whale tail wasn't quite that big, though they were very close... somebody said there were 40, don't know who counts them, but the sea was alive - tails and blowholes and fins flipping and rolling as they played out their primal rituals, oblivious to the oohs and ahs of us onlookers.

Then to Elgin where I sketched the vineyards and the day after the birthday party, off to Cape Town. For once we didn't try to fit everything in, but spoilt ourselves by being tourists, cruising along the coastline and taking in the breathtaking scenery on a sparkling spring day. The top sketch is in the old naval village of Simon's Town, where I sat in the car and sketched the main road while my husband looked for a pharmacy - can't remember what he was after, it couldn't have been serious!

Two more sketches of that trip along the coast to come... my busiest sketching day for a long time.

Prince Albert, Great Karoo

2010-09-12T14:48:00.000+02:00

On our trip down to the Cape, after an eleven hour drive from Johannesburg, we stopped for the night at Prince Albert where we'd booked into the Swartberg Hotel. First gratefully downing a cold beer in the pub, under the gaze of some poor departed nyala antelope and a huge pair of kudu horns (my proportions are way out, they were much bigger than the heads) we strolled round the village of beautifully restored Victorian and Cape Dutch buildings, housing mohair and weaving businesses, galleries and craft shops, as the setting sun inflamed the surrounding mountains.

We were entertained at dinner with some of the legends and ghost stories of the 125 year old hotel by our waitress, but were assured that our room was not haunted, whew. The next morning while my husband had a look inside, I sat in the garden of the museum and sketched an ox-wagon with the Seven Arches gallery and restaurant behind it. The plant-like structures on the roof are scrap-metal sculptures by one of the area's many artists.
We didn't use the spectacular steep, zigzagging Swartberg Pass through the mountains as it was under repair after heavy rains, going instead via the equally spectacular but less vertigo-inducing Meiringspoort - but the mind boggles to think how these wagons negotiated their way, long before any roads were built.

Vineyard Afternoon

2010-09-10T14:49:00.000+02:00

Another long absence from this space, but I've been having a wonderful break in the most beautiful Cape in all the world - a fairly impulsive trip to help celebrate a birthday, as it's a long way to drive - but well worthwhile on all fronts. A happy family gathering, a party, spring seeping into all the mountains and valleys, sea and veld, wonderful stays in towns and villages that we have whizzed through before and longed to spend a little longer Sometime... well the Sometime arrived and all we wanted to do was spend a lot longer, so next Sometime...

This pen and watercolour sketch was done from a kitchen window on a farm in Elgin, a valley rippling with apple and pear orchards, vineyards and olive groves - on an afternoon where a gale was whipping the trees and vines and threatening to sabotage the birthday party - but at 4 o'clock it dropped as if exhausted and all was calm for the celebrations, to everyone's relief.

If any of our friends and family see these holiday posts and wonder why they didn't see us... I'm sorry! It was a whistle-stop week long tour, and we were being mostly tourists this time. Hope to be back soon for a more sociable visit! Other sketches I did were so rushed and scribbly, I need to work on them a bit to make them presentable, but hope to be sharing a bit more of our lovely week away with you soon.

Afternoon in Newtown

2010-08-22T14:24:00.000+02:00

Yesterday was the second gathering of our new Joburg Sketchers group - only two of us turned up this time, but we had an absolutely lovely afternoon in Newtown, in Johannesburg's inner city, a hub of city life and industry in the early 1900's, revived as a home for artists, musicians and actors with the establishment of the Market Theatre in the 1970's, and has once again been rejuvenated with the building of the new Nelson Mandela bridge making access easier. I absolutely loved it - I'd chosen it as a place to practice some building sketching on, with some of our oldest and newest architecture visible from there, but was so attracted by the colour and people that I didn't end up fitting many buildings in (nothing to do with the fact that I find them so hard to draw of course!) After sitting outside the Market Theatre drinking coffee, me drawing the stalls, John my sketching companion (very competently!) some buildings - we moved across the square to another small market in the shade of enormous old trees, which I can't find any information about, but which, if they could talk, would surely tell tales of much of the areas tumultuous history.

I haven't captured the scale of them, the palm tree is much taller, the far one much broader - I'm sure children could slide down the base of its trunk which is probably the area of the average -um, I don't know- bathroom? I added colour to this one afterwards, leaving the background 'sunbleached', well that's my story anyway!

Everybody moved around a lot so the centre figure got really muddled, but these two women sussed out that I was drawing them and kindly sat still under their gorgeous rainbow umbrella - I've emailed a copy of it to Ntosh on the right. This tree scene I felt could be almost anywhere in Africa, it was reassuring and relaxing to find it right in the middle of the biggest centre of commerce on the continent - can't wait to go back and sketch some more.

Shells

2010-08-16T17:56:00.000+02:00

Back to oil paints, I'm really switching around mediums in my eternal quest to find my forté and my style. This was admittedly also a practical choice - I painted it for everyONEcounts, an iniative for artists to raise funds for the care of abandoned babies in South Africa by donating artworks to be exhibited and sold - and oil on a gallery wrap canvas doesn't need framing and is, I hope, sturdier to be sent to Kwazulu Natal where the exhibition is to be held. All paintings are 12"x12" or 30x30cm. I spent ages thinking about how to interpret the theme 'every one counts', and scrummaging around my shelves for inspiration came upon a bag of seashells collected over beach holidays over the years. They seemed to speak to me, of multitudes and aloneness... of fragility and strength, difference and similiarity, intricacy and simplicity, abundance and preciousness, shelter and vulnerability. If you think too much about shells you can hardly bear to crush one underfoot.

Winter garden

2010-08-09T10:53:00.000+02:00

I've had a small flurry of impulsive painting in the last couple of days - I revisited an oil painting that I decided was deadly boring, now not sure if I've stuffed it up completely or improved it, so I'm taking a while to look at it and decide which. I may share that later... or not! I then thought I'd do a watercolour on one of my stash of big sheets (65x48cm) with wet drippy paint, masking out highlights so the brushstrokes could be loose... just looking out of my studio door at the bare plum tree and bits of foliage down the side of the wall for subject matter, I started splashing... As soon as the paint went on I found, once again, that this paper has got too old, too hot and cold, or dry... and lost its sizing so just sucked up the moisture. Nevertheless, I carried on painting with rather murky colours, and when it was dry, went in with my Caran d'Ache Neocolor crayons, as the watercolour wasn't behaving as it should - happily a grey lourie came and sunned himself in the branches and provided a needed focal point. Still painting too fast and without forethought, this is really a big sketch, but I think that's the way my life is right now - catching the chance to do what I can and when.

SketchCrawl - with company!

2010-08-01T14:45:00.000+02:00

Yesterday was a great day!... the 28th World Wide SketchCrawl and, at last, there was a group of us instead of just me! I'd heard from John Philip through this blog, and he being of an age and mind to know how to do these things, started a Facebook Event to invite interested people to come along to the Emmarentia botanical gardens to meet and sketch. We had about ten sketchers and a couple more to provide encouragement and model material, and we had a lovely afternoon, in spite of rather chilly weather and dry, sparse wintry gardens to inspire us. When there are more resulting sketches posted, I'll put a link here to the others that were done on the day. I tried to record the occasion by putting as many of my fellow sketchers in mine as possible. We are planning to make it a regular gathering, with many others who couldn't make it keen to join in when they can. Another reason to celebrate, the third anniversary of A Sketch in Time was also yesterday - who would have thought I'd keep anything going that long!?

Walking not sketching

2010-07-26T15:48:00.000+02:00

Yesterday, at last, after watching and sketching from the sidelines in previous years, my husband and I took part in the annual Walk the Talk, now the biggest sporting event in the world with 50 000 participants. We only did the 5km route, which was so easy and pleasant, we wished we'd registered for the 8, or even the 15km one - we're fitter than we thought! This is the third time I'm blogging about this event, which means A Sketch in Time is almost three years old! I sketched at the starting line, thinking I might try along the way as well, but it was hard enough staying with my husband, so I only took out my sketchbook again at the end, where a band was entertaining the crowd, and there was a climbing castle for the children. I added colour to these afterwards - the original line-only ones are on Urban Sketchers.

I painted a little watercolour study later of the lady in red and yellow - she was having a great time dancing to the 'Golden Oldies' music the band was playing, but then a man who was watching over my shoulder asked if he could show his friends, and proceeded to show everybody who I'd sketched, including her, which I'm afraid inhibited her for a bit after that.

Big Birds

2010-07-22T08:04:00.000+02:00

At last my studio has had a good clean up and there is once again space to spread out paper and paint! It's quite a time since I've attempted a 'proper' watercolour so I went back to Hazel Soan's lessons, tentatively finishing my lioness - not wanting to spoil the textures of the dropped in washes and overwork it, but not sure if I've done enough to call it finished.

Then, on a roll and remembering how much I enjoyed painting single ostriches with minimal brushstrokes I searched for these photos I took last year in a mountain pass in the Cape, (I think it was the Barrydale Pass, but we weren't too sure where we were at the time!) when we stopped the car to allow a ...flock?... of ostriches to be herded down the road - not to the B&B where it looks like they're headed, but into the field next door.

I had an idea in my head of the ostriches forming a unified shape with many heads and legs, like this photoshopped version... but the necks and heads looked weird (dancing cobras?) so I added a background - too quickly and impulsively! After all the fast sketching I've been doing, it's hard to slow down and make a carefully considered painting. I do want it to look fresh and loose, but also have believable looking birds and not cartoon characters! It needs some variation in colour too, I think I might try it again.

Back to the Birds

2010-07-16T13:04:00.000+02:00

After all the visitors, colour and excitement of the football, back to normal life, whatever that is - and some quiet time in my studio. I've been sticking fruit in the bare branches of the plum tree right outside my window, and birds have very quickly become expectant about finding more there every morning. I set up sketchbook, watercolours and pen-and-ink ready to sketch them yesterday - the movement of my hand dipping pen into the ink chased the crested barbet (middle) away so I had to do that slo-o-ow motion the next time he arrived. They are comical little birds and sometimes chase each other around on the ground, tumbling and chattering with their feathers fluffed out, like clowns with mad, bad hair. But this one was shy - so in between visits I sketched the blackeyed barbets (oops, I meant bulbuls!), who aren't as bothered by me staring at them through the window - nor by our sluggish old dog trying to catch some feeble winter sun under the branches!

Thanks to everyone who has been so encouraging about my World Cup sketching! I think I took a little leap in sketching fast and wildly in public and it was great to have your support :o)

Makarapa Men

2010-07-12T09:29:00.000+02:00

The World Cup is over, and South Africa is a bit deflated at the end of a magical month. It has flown past and I'm already feeling regret for not having got out and sketched as much as I would have liked to - but on Saturday I went to Melrose Arch where I'd heard supporters of the teams in the final were gathering. There were a few fans wandering around, but I found this 'flash shop' - just open for a short time, where township artists were making makarapas, the iconic converted miners hard-hats that have been creatively worn to local soccer matches for many years - first created by one Alfred Baloyi after watching a bottle flying through the air during a match in Soweto. Makarapa is the Xhosa word for migrant workers in the mines. They've been a huge hit with tourists, along with the raucous vuvuzela (pleas for the banning of which have fallen on deaf ears, ha ha) and these men have turned out many of them. At the shop you could design your own makarapa and they cut it out for you, and paint it, though they were so busy that I painted my own design of... tah rah... an Urban Sketchers makarapa!! Lucas, the man in the middle of my sketch, loved it and is thinking of doing a city themed series. While waiting for it to be cut my husband and I had lunch and I sketched the busy piazza outside. I'm sorry I couldn't get near to the final match or the stadium, but... Congratulations to Spain!

Marimba Band

2010-06-26T19:05:00.000+02:00

Here are sketches I did a few days ago that I've been hestitating to post because they are just so rough and scribbly - a quality I really like in a lot of other people's sketches, but to me it just emphasises the agitation I was feeling at the time - trying to be inconspicuous, annoyed that what I was trying to achieve and show wasn't happening... maybe I'm just too shy to sketch in public... or maybe it's that I need to do it more... I was happier with the second sketch on the right than the first one, and maybe if I'd done a third...? Anyway! Enough with this introspection and the constant self-criticism (I truly am not fishing for compliments, which my blogging friends are always so generous with, it must be getting quite painful - will get over it soon. Maybe.) This was a lovely sunny happy group called the Soweto Marimba Youth League playing outside the African Market in upmarket Rosebank, one of the entertainments put on for World Cup visitors, who were actually the subjects I was after at the time. There were a few foreign languages and accents around and beaming faces thrust into the band for photographs, but they didn't look too different from any other shoppers. I'm going to have to daringly go into one of the fan parks or towards one of the stadiums before a match to catch them fully decked out in supporter's gear and filled with the Fever. This event is changing Johannesburg and South Africa in that most of us middle-class, middle-of-the-road citizens who don't venture anywhere unless it's in the seclusion of our own cars into a secure parking lot, are suddenly taking buses, trains and walking, walking! If the services continue and the 'gees' continues (you have to say that with a guttural gghhh and to rhyme with fierce, it means spirit, goodwill, vibe), I sure hope it does.

Scattered

2010-06-23T12:31:00.000+02:00

I'm sorry once again for the bags of hush from here - I'm kind of chasing my tail, lots of projects on the go but not getting too much done on any of them... a bit of tapestry here... (a long, long-term project that needs to come to fruition now)

a bit of illustration there.. a special book for someone very special and very new but not really something I can put up here, yet anyway...

a feeling I should be out there grabbing the World Cup in sketches but where to go, how to get there, and dang, its cold!

Another little illustration to make me feel as if I'm helping the Gulf with one teeny drop in the ocean... this a postcard sketch for Kelly Light's Ripple project, which is now winging its way to Minnesota

some other work that I'm expecting any day now, the wedding sketchbook that deserves some undivided attention, as do most of these undertakings...

...and the odd wander around the garden and a watercolour sketch of an orchid that was blooming unnoticed all by itself and which has now been blackened by frost before I got to paint the whole thing.

Plus other life, family, friend things that take time, care and energy and a lingering cold that is at last, I think, moving off on its wicked way. I'm hoping for a blast of energy, a shot of inspiration and some clear thinking to proceed with the next logical, useful step along my tangled path.

Do I sound scattered, or just plain scatty?

I think I'll make a list!

Viva vuvuzela viva!

2010-06-10T17:19:00.000+02:00

Yesterday the United We Shall Stand parade swamped the streets of Sandton - tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of people came to show their support for our team, but also to celebrate the fact that the World Cup is here, and demonstrate just how incredibly happy we are that it is. A sea of yellow jerseys interspersed with the South African flag colours, bouncing, throbbing, swaying - accompanied by the deafening, but sometimes reasonably melodious when played well, sound of vuvuzelas, and the odd kudu horn. Groups burst into song and dance, gathering new fans eager to learn the words and steps. The buses eventually made their way past, carrying the press and Bafana Bafana to rapturous greeting. What a wonderful day and spirit of everyone pulling together for this once in a lifetime event.

Standing up and sketching in a lively crowd like this was challenging to say the least, and I was squirmy as some came to peep over my shoulder, all I seemed able to make were illogical scribbles - and I do apologise to viewers and the architects for my buildings! I floundered with my pens, abandoning the fine Pitt pen halfway through the second sketch for the bolder Pentel brushpen and I gave up on colour until later at home, though I did it as fast and sparingly, with Pitt colour pens, as the quick sketches warranted. I'm feeling rather beholden to record as much of the World Cup activities as I can for Urban Sketchers, as there doesn't seem to be another sketcher attending. I'm not a huge soccer fan - though I'm certainly coming round - and I haven't even got tickets to any of the games. If anyone who draws anywhere in South Africa (Liz? Maree? Marie? Debbie? Cathy?) would like to attempt to capture some of the World Cup action, please do - you can share them on the USk Flickr site, or Facebook, or email them to me at catgat at mweb dot co dot za (small files) and I'll post them for you - bear in mind point #1 of the USk manifesto:

We draw on location, indoors or out, capturing what we see from direct observation. - not from photographs or memory.

Prayer for the Gulf

2010-06-06T14:40:00.000+02:00

Sometimes words, and images too, just fail... the catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico is appalling beyond description, but, on the day after World Environment Day, a small contribution to Suzanne McDermott's Spirit of the Gulf Challenge. I've only had a brief glimpse of this coastline on a visit to New Orleans some 17 years ago but have spent much of my childhood happily near the sea, which is all one precious, irreplaceable body of water, as Suzanne points out. Not having my own sea photos to work from, but looking at pictures on the internet and Flickr, and this one in particular I thought of those perfect white wings encircling the gulf and all it's creatures, healing, comforting and restoring. It will take many years and much more physical labour than such a wishful thought could conjure, but... may it be so.

THE SPIRIT OF THE GULF CHALLENGE:

Find a photo or other resource depicting some living aspect of the Gulf of Mexico before the oil disaster or

Tap into your spirit and use your imagination

Make a drawing, painting or other piece of creative work with love and gratitude for the beautiful life of whatever you're depicting.

Post what you make on your website, include a link to this post: Spirit of the Gulf Challenge (or the facebook group — (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=127832103901693) and put the icon below in your sidebar with a link to this post (or the facebook group). Send me a link to your post and I'll add the link to bottom of this post.

Now a facebook group at Spirit of the Gulf facebook group. You can link to your work there! (If you're not on facebook, just email Suzanne your link and she'll post it.)

Invite 5 of your friends or favorite artists to accept this challenge, include a link to this post, the facebook page, copy this description of the challenge and the icon below for their sidebar.

I'm so bad at choosing and passing on, and it takes me forever, so please if you read this, join in!

"Hope" is the thing with feathers -

that perches in the soul -
and sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all.

Emily Dickinson

Flags, flags, flags!

2010-06-04T11:14:00.000+02:00

Things are hotting up for the World Cup (cooling down as far as the weather goes) and flags are busting out all over Joburg, on buildings, cars, restaurants - these flag-sellers at almost every traffic light and street corner are doing a roaring trade. I had an hour or more yesterday waiting for my son's exam to be over to sit in my car and sketch them. See a couple more over on Urban Sketchers.

Amazing Olde England

2010-05-29T12:45:00.000+02:00

I'm back again - well, have been for a week but was slain by a cold and also have been sluggish about getting back to normal life after all the excitement and highs of a wonderful wedding trip.

I did little sketching and hardly got my paints out - it was primarily a lovely time spent with family and friends, reunions, celebrations, and sightseeing of the first bit of England outside of London that I've been to. Windsor, Oxford, little Pangbourne, Stonehenge!... I wondered if I'd ever get there and now I have... the wedding itself was held in the idyllic settings of bluebell woods and the tulip bedecked garden of this old Priory home, which I sketched very badly on the spot and have not done any justice at all. The top sketch is from the lower double window in the middle one...

...and this a 'pleached' apple tree, carefully trained and pruned into a long flattened shape over many years, leaning over 'black' and pink tulips that echoed the colours of the old tree. I could've spent months or more just moving a few metres at a time to the next perfect picture-painting spot, it's all so beautiful, but this time was much more sociable than that - I did a few sketches pre and during the wedding... quickly and inadequately, leaving my carefully chosen watercolour palette undisturbed as I grabbed at fleeting images in fine pen lines. I'm now adding colour and a couple more scenes to flesh out the album, from photographs as a gift to the newlyweds. Once they've seen them, I'll show them to you - my intentions to present it to them as they left on honeymoon were completely unrealistic, but I hope it won't be too long a-coming!

Off we go!

2010-05-04T18:53:00.000+02:00

A real quickie... I sketched this while waiting at a traffic light and added watercolour later. A very common midday sight here of a nanny - usually called Ousie, meaning sister, or Gogo (pronounced gawgaw, sort of) meaning grandmother if she's an older woman - collecting her young charge from nursery school. I'm on my way to England tomorrow for the wedding of a very special niece, and to see my very special daughter, so won't be posting for the next two weeks. I hope to do some sketching, but also lots of catching up with my sisters and other family, so not sure if the sketching will win this time. See you later!

Orchid show and a sale!

2010-04-26T17:01:00.000+02:00

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.

My Hill

2010-04-21T15:27:00.000+02:00

I took my Pentel Brushpen out for a walk this morning and sketched my 'killer hill' from about a third of the way up. This is looking down the hill, I hope you can tell, towards the dam. It's difficult to get all the textures and tonal variation with the brushpen, but good that it forces me to see light and dark.
This hill on my morning walk used to make me pant, groan and puff all the way, but now I can stride up it with little strain. Is that progress, or what?!

Waiting...

2010-04-14T17:46:00.000+02:00

.... for my exhaust to be fixed

.....for my husband to come out of the shops

.....for my son to get out of college

These were sketched not knowing if I had 10 seconds or 15 minutes to get them down, so a bit panicky!

Quick sketches

2010-04-11T16:55:00.000+02:00

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!

Back to the Stations

2010-04-05T18:18:00.000+02:00

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.

Hazel Soan Workshop Day Four

2010-03-29T14:02:00.000+02:00

It's been a long time a-coming, but..

Finally, Fascinating Day Four...

Another day allotted to wildlife - we had references for three of the Big Five, elephants, a close up head of a lioness and of a buffalo - once again we couldn't keep up with Hazel's fully packed schedule for the day, so sadly didn't get to the buffalo.

My unfinished lioness - waiting patiently for me to get back to her - some day...

My garishly overworked first attempt at elephants using different palette combinations

My pale imitation of Hazel's painting (see below)

Hazel stressed again the importance of tone over colour, saying one could paint an elephant with any combination of transparent yellow, red and blue - no opaque pigments, as layers of colour are built up to produce the the tonal range.

To show this, she painted three versions of an elephant using three different palettes... the first using yellow ochre (semi-opaque, so used only in very thin washes), ultramarine and alizarin crimson - the second using Indian yellow, prussian blue and alizarin crimson and the third - as an experiment - raw umber, transparent turquoise and quinacridone red. With the size of the elephant again determined by the size of the brush she started each one with the palest yellow wash to form the shape, leaving white highlights where the sun struck their backs, then the second wash, paying attention always to tone, then the third dropped into the shadows. To make the dark tones, she mixed a purple/violet with all three colours, in a drier mixture to add definition.
My first elephants were a bit of a sorry affair, so with the next demonstration I tried to follow her method more closely - and ended up with a pale imitation, but all in the pursuit of new skills.I've assembled a series of her steps showing how gently and subtley she builds up washes, each elephant different, concentrating on tone, not colour the whole way through. The front ellies more defined than the back and their feet fading as the dust is kicked up and obscures them. Using the background to bring out the foreground, she mixed stronger greens from the same three colours for the foliage, mixing wet in wet with hard edges to vary it, softening it towards the ground where it's dusty. Reminding us constantly to see "shapes not lines". The demo was photographed in the mirror angled above her workspace. Here, the right way round, Hazel's finished elephant painting.

For the last demonstration of the day, and of the workshop, Hazel brought out a sheet of the Khadi paper that she loves for brighter, bolder wildlife painting - ideal for the lioness' head full of texture and deep colour. This, she says, is no longer a shape, but a block that you have to work within. The interest is in the features. Once they are carefully placed (in pencil) she works within each feature - each one a separate element. Starting with an ear, yellow ochre with burnt sienna dropped into the wet wash, then Winsor violet into the darks, painting with water to bring back whites and letting it flow and settle... "It's not an ear, it's watercolour!" Dropping in sepia to get jet darks, allowing the paint to spread into the dampened outline to look like soft fur.. where she didn't want the paint to spread so far, she used drier paint on the brush. Colours mixed on the paper rather than on the palette. For the eyes to have soft edges, she wet around their shapes and outlined them with sepia, adding yellow ochre and burnt sienna to the middle of the eye so that it 'punched out' the sepia, leaving the all important white spot of eye light.

Hazel's magnificent finished lioness, photographed under less than ideal conditions so looks more subdued than she actually is.

A few final words on Hazel - her dedication to painting and to her priorities are striking and palpable. When I asked if I may blog the workshop, I naively suggested that it may encourage a few more people to register for future workshops, and she told me - very gently - that actually, she has offers from all around the world to hold them in the most wonderful and tantalising places all the time, and she turns most of them down because, first, she wanted to spend time with her son while he was growing up, and because she wants to paint. When we were discussing the internet and Facebook, and she heard of what could be done to promote her name and work on there, she didn't think long before she replied: but it would take so much time away that could be spent painting. Though I 'know' this is what is necessary in theory, it was quite startling to hear that someone would forego travel opportunities like that, to work on her art and passion. Which makes me very grateful indeed that she was persuaded to squeeze this workshop into her busy life and that I squeezed onto it!

Have you nominated your favourite watercolour books on Katherine Tyrell's survey Which are the best art books about watercolour painting? yet? My newly signed copy of 'What shall I paint' will be suggested there soon, as well as one or two others, just got to find a couple more minutes this week!

Hazel Soan Workshop Day Three

2010-03-23T10:58:00.000+02:00

I should have said Terrific Day Two in that last post, but I started writing it when I was still trying to catch my breath! Onwards now though to...

Enthralling Day Three!

Painting people - something I thought would be quite a breeze as I have drawn and painted so many of them over the years. Don't know if it was the workshop pressure situation or trying to follow Hazel's steps, but I really struggled to begin with as you can see in the top set of figures. Part of the problem was still adding too much water to my washes and not controlling the blending enough ("You are in control!" says HS) But once again I learnt so much and have been rejuvenated and enthused into wanting to paint people as subject matter again, instead of just for 'work'.

We began with figures on white paper as coloured 'silhouettes', as with the ostriches and antelope. Using the size of the brush (an old brush with the point worn down is good in this case) to dictate the size of the head, Hazel made dots and (carefully shaped with brush) dashes to indicate head, arms and legs - hardly worry about the feet, she says, just a touch of shadow to ground the figure. And "to make figures with life... let the watercolours run together... watercolour is beautiful... the reference is just a guide... bad photographs make good paintings... the secret is to make your colour merge..." - some of her running commentary as she effortlessly produced her line of people strolling away, quite ready to go into a frame or a book. Off we went to try and emulate her - and found it was not effortless at all!

On to 'people with props' - umbrellas, baskets, on donkeys or bicycles - are shapes of shade and tone, not separate elements attached to each other, so again allow colours to merge. "Catch or make the attractive shape...Where arms cross the body, leave a white line on top, allow the shadow side to blend in."

Now here is something I'm sure I should have known, but didn't - if your watercolours are transparent they'll blend together, but opaque watercolours will push out and overtake the transparent colour, as in this example where she's indicated a bright pattern on a skirt by touching Cadmium yellow and red into transparent Turquoise. The turquoise on the right was touched in with transparent Indian Yellow, and it immediately blended with the blue to make green. So if you have a 'coloured silhouette' figure, and you want to add a bright punch of colour for pattern or to introduce light, touch an opaque into the wet transparent. If you mix opaques with transparents on your palette, you'll make mud - who knew??!! I bet many of you did, but it's a revelation to me!

Hazel then went on to paint a quick 'reflected light on whites' painting before lunch, using our own Jacques Kallis and Graham Smith as reference - I couldn't believe the vivid aureolin yellow and prussian blue she washed into the 'white' shadows to start with, but by the time she added the bright green grass, it all calmed into a coherent and believable painting of the cricketers. I didn't have time to finish mine, but here is the beginning of it to show how startling are the shadows before they're put into context by the field (mine may be a little more startling than hers). She hardly mixes colours on her palette, mostly allowing them to blend on the paper - "what people love is the watercolour, not the picture of the cricketers!"

After lunch we were faced with the challenge of a closer up figure, with strong highlights. This one really reminded me of my days as a renderer in the ad industry, and I trusted myself a bit more to do it the way I would have with Magic Markers, rather than nervously follow step by step, and actually they are very similiar methods! Leave the highlights white, in with light tone of burnt sienna, carefully forming the shapes in the face, drop in darks of a mixture of burnt sienna and Winsor violet, then the blue shadow value of the shirt, leaving the edges of the glass and the coke can white. Leave highlights crisp, soften and blend in the shadows - add the stripes in a 'pure' colour, in this case, Hookers Green. Add details into glasses, cans, chair (I should have put more colour into his sunglasses) and wash in the background, carefully leaving the highlighted contour of head and shirt. Voila! This is mine - one I was relatively happy with!

Throughout the day Hazel had been egging us on, saying she had so much more to show us, full of excitement and enthusiasm, but by this point we were all fading - she persevered though, with yet another demonstration of strongly lit figures with deep darks contrasting the lights, I don't think any of us attempted this at the end of the day, we were kaput! Here is Hazel's beautiful painting though - when I get to referring to my notes and attempting this project, I'll put it up on the blog too.

Hazel's versions of Day Two!

2010-03-19T15:27:00.000+02:00

My versions on Day Two are in the post below this!

These photographs of Hazel's work-in-progress giraffe were taken sitting in front of her demonstration table, which had a mirror angled above it so that we could see exactly what she was doing, brushstroke by brushstroke, as well as her palette and how she mixed her colours - quite sparingly, I was surprised to see.

Step one: Laid down a blue wash for the sky - she used French ultramarine here - pulling it into the shadowed areas on the giraffe's neck and face. Aureolin yellow splattered into the damp wash to indicate trees in the background.

Step Two: A pale yellow ochre wash into the face and down the neck, burnt sienna touched into the ochre to build up the tone and the hue in the face, and sepia touched in on the horns, using the side or the edge of the brush to create the texture of the hairy tips - not painted hairs!

Step Three: Adding the details to the face - shadows from a mix of Burnt sienna and ultramarine in the ears and darks of the eye, with a bit of sepia I think - just one light brushstroke for the eyelash of the far eye! Deepening and softening the shadow down the neck.

Step Four: Adding the pattern onto the neck in burnt sienna, with more ultramarine on the dark shadow side.

She produces her vivid, rich colours knowing exactly how much water and pigment is on her brush. I have always mixed up huge pools of watercolours, sloshing more water in with every brushload and consequently throwing buckets of expensive paint down the plughole - another good lesson learnt!

Hazel Soan Workshop Day Two

2010-03-16T22:32:00.000+02:00

Nope, sorry - I didn't keep up with my intention of posting every day about the workshop! After trying to absorb all the tons of information - what a generous and totally giving teacher she is - all the concentration and painting, painting, painting for 6 hours a day (plus an hour for lunch) I got home completely exhausted and unable to string two words together.

But now, after a little rest, to continue with...

Phew! Day Two - sketching wildlife - didn't start off well, as I hadn't heard (concentrating too hard on my sunflowers) that it would start half an hour early, and was late. I missed the first demonstration of painting ostriches and didn't have the references printed out, so spent most of the morning flustered, rushing and catching up. In spite of all that, I loved painting these big goofy birds with their shaggy feathers - I think it's a subject I'll go back to when I want to have fun!... I think the lesson was to make the shape of the bird, as with the leaves, using the right size brush to create the neck and legs, and the side of the brush to make the body - dark against light, so just onto the white paper, with colour dropped into the washes.
The next demo was a background wash of ultramarine with a silhouetted shape - in this case, a back lit cormorant - on top of the dry wash using ultramarine and burnt sienna, both non-staining so can be lifted, scraped or touched up with chinese white paint to get back highlights. Again, they were to be "brushstrokes, not birds" - Hazel's were exquisite examples of this - just a flick of the brush across the surface of the paper, and there, perfectly formed, a cormorant poised to dart into flight or to fish....

I'm discovering my washes need lots of work! I haven't been mixing enough paint to cover the whole area, so add water and pigment halfway and cause cauliflowers or cabbages to form... nor have I been mixing it thoroughly, and get streaks and blobs. Too impatient and not enough care!

Then we did a half lit cormorant on a background wash of aureolin and prussian blue(mine far too garish). My second wash was even more blotchy and streaky (though I partly blame - bad workman! - my paper which was old and dry and sucked in all the water). We were to leave a white shape of the highlight on the bird's back, covering all the rest with the wash, then painted the darks of the cormorant over the wash so the shadowed side wasn't separate from the background, then softening into the highlighted area.

Next came painting antelope using a soft yellow ochre wash to identify the overall shape, then laying on burnt sienna, leaving shapes of highlighted areas and dropping in touches of ultramarine in the dark areas. Being these two pigments, again they could be lifted off with a damp brush to reveal more highlights, or the stripes on the kudu - still felt rushed and agitated at this stage and did a rather shoddy job, but here they are anyway! These are all things Hazel paints from life in the bush, in minutes and instinctively, knowing exactly where her colours are and how to render the creature she has in her sights!

Finally for the day, a close up head of a giraffe. You'll see above the stages that Hazel used - I've put it in a separate post so as not to make it look as if I'm trying to pass off her paintings as my own! By this stage I was so tired, willing my giraffe to please, please, not go wrong. I think if it were the only painting I was doing that day, I would have put more into the darks, been more careful with the spots and softened some hard edges, but as it was, I was quite pleased with painting into such a big shape without stuffing it up, and keeping it fairly loose and not overworking anything.

At this point, I think I must remark that, although this may seem like a slavish following of Hazel's methods, they are all techniques that she instinctively uses after her years of experimenting, and her gift to us (I did ask her permission to blog this workshop!) is to take the time and thought to put her natural - though she plans ahead - actions into a sequence that we can use, to paint freely and in our own style once we know a few sound principles and logical steps to produce - as was her aim in this workshop - vibrant, lively watercolours.

Also, some of this I, and I'm sure many of you, do know from our own experiments or reading or lessons, but to have the sequence so clearly laid out when say, presented with a beautiful silhouetted subject on a coloured background, will make painting it much simpler. If you're anything like me you'll be scratching your head thinking, " now, how did I do that last time..?" by which time the bird, or kudu, or whatever, has flown!

Hazel Soan Workshop Day One

2010-03-16T16:38:00.000+02:00

I'm halfway through the Hazel Soan's workshop already, and apologise once again for being AWOL for so long. Yesterday I got home too worn out (in a good way) to sit at the computer and record the whole experience, but today I realise if I don't write it up as it finishes, I might never do it, or at least not be able to recall with any clarity each day's activities.

So here, in a nutshell, is what we did on Wonderful Day One:

For this we had to bring an array of various leaves and flowers, as well as some reference photographs that Hazel had specified - reeds back lit against the sky - dark against light, and sunflowers with light coming from the side, so some lost and found edges, background and foreground. Starting with the leaves, she did a demonstration using different sized brushes according to the size and shape of the leaf.

Where Hazel gets her energy I don't know - she had just got off a plane from teaching a workshop in Kenya the night before, and was as fresh and eager to pass on some of her vast knowledge of watercolour as if we were her only students this year. I'm going to be rather disjointed, and just write down little sound bytes of what Hazel said as she demonstrated and walked around the students helping and giving advice, as I am just too tired to organise it all into a comprehensive summary just now.

•Watercolour is perfect, the less you do, the better it is.

•The subject is the excuse to use watercolours - not the watercolours in order to paint the subject.

•Leaves are brushstrokes - we're not painting leaves, we're painting brushstrokes.

•Vary your colours and strokes - entertain the eye.

•Become a slave to TONE - relative tone is the secret of painting - forget matching colour exactly - colour changes according to light and surroundings.

•Paint beautiful patches of watercolour, not 'flowers'

•Order your palette and keep it simple - a warm and a cool - red, yellow, blue. *A note from me - I'm amazed at how spartan her equipment is. We students came with case-loads of tubes and pans, huge water containers and mixing receptacles - she had a paintbox and a tiny bag of tubes to refill it, her brushes, three little water pots and a small bottle of water to replace dirty with clean, and that's it! For all the leaves we used just Aureolin and Prussian blue. For the flower page we added touches of Permanent Rose and Dioxazine Violet. The sunflowers were Indian Yellow and Ultramarine, with Burnt Sienna and Sepia, and a bit of aureolin to vary the greens.

I finally pulled out my stash of beautiful watercolour paper that I've been collecting and hoarding for years, waiting for the time that I could paint well enough to warrant using it, for this workshop and Lo!.. it actually helps one to paint better! Watercolour does what one is hoping it will do a lot more often on lovely paper. My reed painting though, was a total failure - partly because my reference photo was front, not back lit, but my wet-in-wet didn't work, my dry brush didn't scumble, not even the Arches could save it. Ah well.

I'm so pleased to find a fellow Johannesburg blogger, talented Debbie Schiff of Debbie Does Art (love that name!) at the workshop, which reminds me that she and Maree of Art & Creativity passed on the Sunshine Award to me some time ago, and I haven't even acknowledged it here yet, let alone passed it on. Thank you both so much - life has been overtaking me lately - I hope to catch up soon!

Make your own scraperboard

2010-03-08T11:35:00.000+02:00

I've been very busy!! Some nice visitors and company, and necessary cleaning up operations beforehand - and I was asked, last year in fact, to make some images for The Stations of the Cross for our church, but I had too much other work on. I thought I'd have plenty of time this year, but once again, it's a rush. I've pondered for weeks on what to do, and how to do it in an economical way, as well as fast and effective. One wee-hours-of-the-morning rumination brought forth the memory of this method of making homemade scraperboard that I learnt years ago in an art class, and which I used to make the above sketch of my daughter - still in a school uniform at the time, so it's a good ten years ago. This is too big for the scanner and in a frame, so not the best reproduction. It's not the sort of scraperboard you can make those perfect, highly detailed illustrations on, but it's great for loose marks and ready-made textures, which are quite a surprise as you pass over various brushstrokes and layers of polish. Here's how you do it, for anyone who's interested...

I did it on fairly heavy paper the first time, but this time I've used Masonite, as it needs to be sturdy and hung easily with string or wire.

Lightly sand the board so paint will stick - this step not necessary on paper support.
Freely paint with white PVA. Don't worry about getting the brushstrokes too smooth if you want texture. Let it dry well and give it another coat if needed. Dry well again.
Apply wax clear floor polish with a soft cloth, let dry, polish lightly and apply another coat. Allow to dry and harden.
Paint on Indian ink with a large soft brush. The wax will resist the ink at first, but keep at it...
After three or four passes and cross-brushing, the ink will stick and cover the white paint
I varied the edges of the boards, leaving some rough and some covered right to the edge.
Allow to dry thoroughly.
Start scratching!

I use a small craft knife to scrape with, which gives me various line widths from very fine to broad depending on how its held, but you can use whatever works best for you. Brush off loose ink that's been scraped off with a soft dry brush.

* A Warning! I got some raindrops splashed on one of my boards, and the ink just lifted straight off. I'm going to have to work out how to seal them to make them less fragile.

I'm not sure if I'll use this hand in the series - it is my hand and although I tried to make it look more masculine (I have pretty workman-like hands anyway), it still looks like mine. Though this was very quick to draw, I need to get scraping, as Easter rushes up - in between my workshop next week and preparations for that, and 100 other things going on right now. I am hoping it will sometimes be a peaceful, meditative Lenten process in spite of the time pressures.