11,12, Dig and Delve

We've had agonisingly slow internet connections for a while, interspersed with power cuts so a big batch of Every Day in May sketches in one post... I feel I'm doing this challenge a bit like my great-nephew's quick way to count to a hundred..."one, two, miss a few, ninety-nine, a hundred". Although I've only missed one, Day 13's The last thing you bought, I've combined a couple - 11 and 12 Hat and Steps - the ones outside my studio where I'm ever-so-slowly turning bare earth into a little garden with railway sleeper steps, paving stones, a birdbath and groundcover - and 15 and 16 Ingredients for a favourite recipe (chocolate cake - forgot the sugar!) and Something to measure with.

The others are 14. Something you use every day - my glasses, every hour of every day, when I'm not searching for them;
15. Something you could Throw Away - my bags and boxes full of jacaranda pods - They've been turned into Christmas wreaths and angels, painted in oils, watercolour and inks and still every year our two trees rain down another batch and I can't resist picking them up and stashing them, they are so pretty!


18. Lipstick - a very red one that I never wear - it just looks ridiculous on me, like a reverse No Entry sign; and 19. a Cupcake - I resisted going out to buy one or spending a morning baking because... you know why, so used a photo I took at a friend's wedding a few weeks ago.

Like others, I'm not sure how long I'm going to keep this up - other projects are calling and a possibility of exhibiting some work if I can finish it...

EDM 8, 9, 10

 Not keeping up at all with Every Day in May. This sometimes feels like a freelance job that nobody's going to pay me for, especially with the "pack shots". Once I get going on shapes, shines and reflections on surfaces though I get drawn into the happy place of total involvement, and it doesn't feel like work any more.

Days 8 & 9 combined - Something with a handle, and an interesting label. My Brown Betty teapot (discovered it was called that in the facebook group) and Eleven O'Clock Rooibos tea, been around as long as I have judging by the fifties style label and my memories of my grandmother serving it. I loathed it then but love it now as a bedtime drink that won't keep me up all night.

Day 10 - Something you can switch on and off - my trusty Crazy Duck hairdryer. Other more stylish hairdryers have come and gone, but this guy keeps blowing hot air tirelessly over 30+ years and still makes me smile. I enjoyed painting him, strangely - and my son who doesn't often comment on what I'm doing said "Cool, mom, can I have this one?" Score!

Envelopes - Days Gone By

Eeh, a day behind - yesterday's theme, though I sketched it last night. Personal envelopes (not the kind with little windows unfortunately) are becoming a rare sight, all covered with stamps, handwriting and postmarks.
I used to check my letterbox almost as often as I now check my emails, as one of the many South Africans with many or most of their family and old friends living elsewhere in the world. In fact sit in front of and stare at it - willing one of those crisp, fat packages of news and connectivity to plop through the slot from loved ones. Little gifts, when you consider all that went into writing, stamping, and posting them, sometimes enclosing drawings or children's scribbles, compared to dashing off a few lines in an email or dialing up on Skype. Which is fantastic and miraculous, make no mistake, but just not the same. These are from my three sisters - one sadly no longer with us - from different parts of the world, I wish I'd kept more of them. I think I'll make a new family law that says we have to write each other one real humdinger of a letter a year, except I'll probably be the first to break it. (BTW the address on the top one is obsolete so you won't reach me there if you're thinking of writing:)

An exciting white slip did arrive this week in our rusty old disused letterbox. To collect a parcel from the P.O. which turned out to be packs of postcards from images published in The Art of Urban Sketching. 100 each of three of mine, and a wonderful collection of a hundred of the other participating urban sketcher's works which I'm really thrilled to have and keep - not sending those, but postcard, anyone?

Something with Bristles

So much for posting every day - just keeping up with drawing is about all I can manage. Day 6's EDM challenge 'something with bristles' immediately made me think of the drawing into ink washes with bleach method that I first tried here. Great for fine lines and scrubby marks. I was asked to post a tutorial by a couple of people on the Facebook page, so here goes:

Materials:

• Black water-soluble fountain pen ink. Not sure if Parker Quink is available everywhere, it's a standard stationery item here. (the flower on the top is mine :)) 
• Ordinary household bleach. I wasn't aware of how bad it is for you till someone mentioned it in the comments and I looked it up. Wear gloves and a mask, open the windows and doors!
• Water for rinsing and diluting the ink and bleach - a small nozzled bottle is very useful - and small containers to hold the solutions.
• Old or non-precious brushes. I think bleach would eat any natural bristle
• Bamboo pens or sticks to draw with - likewise bleach would destroy a metal pen nib
• Watercolour or drawing paper - different types will give different results. I masked the edges with tape.
• Things to add texture - sponges, toothbrush, paper towel.

Prepare your paper with ink washes. Vary the dilutions - with Quink you'll see the black separate in places into blue and orangey pigments.

 Add textures if you like, flick on ink or bleach solution, dab with paper towel or a sponge - experiment. Allow to dry - or if you start working into the wash while still damp it will give softer edges.

 Dilute a little bleach with water in a small container. It seems to work just as well as full strength. Have your reference material or photo at the ready.

 I started by bleaching out the negative shapes in my leaf design with an old paintbrush

 Adding lines with a bamboo pen - if you dilute the bleach more you can get less stark lines

 and some pattern or cross hatching

 If you like you can go back in with ink washes, lines and splashes

Not my most successful result, but the more you play around, the more options you'll come up with, and are sure to encounter some happy accidents along the way. I can't vouch for the archival qualities of this method - I've heard that the paper will eventually deteriorate but so far my earlier drawings have survived. Have fun!

EVERY DAY in May!

I signed up for the annual 'Every Day in May' challenge on Facebook and Flickr. Am already thinking, Oy what was I thinking!?... I decided to brush up on my watercolour skills while doing this and really enjoyed the first three days - maybe watercolour is my medium after all. I've been faffing around with oils for a while now and still don't quite feel the love.

Day 1 was a favourite food, and the only appetizing things in my kitchen were some grapefruit and avocados that we'd bought at the roadside on a recent trip to the bush. Just come into season, fresh and delicious!

Day 2 - a nearby Tree -  so I looked out of our front window and lo, there was a beautifully autumnal Pride of India (or Crepe Myrtle) that I'd hardly noticed was turning. Nothing like painting something to appreciate your surroundings.

Day 3 was Curtains and as I'd left all my painting clobber by the window and had room on the side of the page, I added the sitting room curtain plus more of the rather unkempt background garden (top of this post)







Day 4 - Bottle/s of spice or herbs. Not really inspired by this one and left it till late in the day to pull a common old bottle of Robertson's cinnamon out of the cupboard and tackle it.  Drawing it took me right to my days as a 'renderer' in an ad agency - back in the day when there were no computers, digital cameras or google. We had shelf-loads of reference magazines and racks of Magic Markers and I drew for eight hours a day and sometimes more and all weekend if there was a big campaign on - no extra pay! 'Pack shots' similar to this one were where I stared intensely at glass, plastic, ellipses, shadows and logos to work out how to recreate them 2D on paper.

Day 5 - Something Hot. Seeing as my husband wouldn't pose :) I settled for my morning coffee in a hot orange mug. Thoroughly overworked in places, I seem to be getting worse at this as I go along. Should be good for me though, if I persevere!

I'll try and post every day for the rest of May to prevent having to write so much the next time - short and sweet to get bum off seat.

A Bunch of Sketches & Visitors

 Yikes - it's April, and autumn already, and I've been so busy sketching and painting and thinking about what I want to/need to/have to do - posting it all has taken a back seat. To think I once started blogging to try and motivate myself to draw more... well, something's working at the moment!

We've had a couple of visits lately from sketchers from other parts of the country and the world. Ex-Joburg Sketcher Barbara Moore came up recently from her new home in Simon's Town in the Cape, and three of us had a relaxed morning catching up and sketching on a beautiful clear autumn day at Zoo Lake.

An icecream man pondering the lake with a beaded dragonfly mobile behind him

Waitrons and a mirrored angel - over cappucinos at Moyo restaurant 

A couple of weeks before that French urban sketcher Michel Davinroy was in town. He had been sketching prolifically on his own, but joined us at a Dance Umbrella rehearsal at the Market Theatre for the difficult challenge of capturing the unpredictable movements of contemporary dancers, mostly in the dark!

And yesterday, we arranged a mid-week sketching session in the nearby suburb of Melville to meet Brighton, England resident and world traveller Fiver Löcker.

It's exciting that we are so much "on the map" that sketchers from around the world are starting to seek us out to draw together, and enrich us all with their stories, sketches and enthusiasm! 

Car guards and basket ladies outside the Golf Tearoom in Melville

Fiver sketching on her iPad in the eclectic clutter of Antz café, Melville

Bassline Musicians

Our group met in Newtown for our regular First Friday date and decided to walk over to The Bassline, a live music venue which has hosted concerts for almost every major South African musician for the last 15 years. A bronze statue of late music legend Brenda Fassie (affectionately known as MaBrrr) gazes over the square, with a hospitable chair next to her for anyone who wants to pose for a photo, or in this case, a sketch. Wisdom was a willing volunteer who went and sat for us as soon as he saw what we were doing, and was very insistent that I noted down his name for posterity. 

There was a lot of activity in front of the club - a tall-hatted cleaner and a series of people who gathered and hung around until a shady looking character arrived, did some exchanges with each of them and disappeared until the next lot. I didn't investigate further, and tried not to make any eye contact! 

I started drawing some men sitting on the lawn in the square while the others finished, when the man with the guitar, Paulos, spotted me drawing him (he had also tried to pose on MaBrr's chair earlier, but too late for my sketch). He leapt up and came and stood right in front of me, launching joyfully and without restraint into a loud crackly version of "I wanna know what love is", and then, when I said I hadn't finished him yet, into a sort of rap conversation with Wisdom adding a background chorus "Johannesburg, Johannesburg"... Not sure if we were supposed to reply in kind, but it was very funny, and fun. I hope we lightened his day as much as he did ours!