Pastel Rocks

Some more pastels produced while taking the online course on by art professor and teacher Gregory Kerr, using different methods of creating the paintings. This one of my son - about 25 years ago - and our dog Gucci who has featured elsewhere on this blog... he wasn't actually present at the rock pool, or even born at the time, but due to the wonders of photography and drawing he makes an appearance. This one was built onto a charcoal base.

And this was onto a base of a tonal ink painting, which is how I got such dark areas - difficult otherwise with the medium. This is my husband's grandmother's bridesmaid transported from Cape Town in 1910 to a Kidds Beach thicket of bush. How are those flowers!

So what do I like about pastels?

• They are quick, you can lay down colour in seconds, layer after layer.
• They are easy to change, almost endlessly depending on your paper. You can work and rework and add and remove over and over again.
• There are loads of colours available, but you can get lots of effects just with a basic set.
• They're easy to take out and put away.
• You can get lovely veils of colour, as well as expressive marks.

What don't I like?

• They are dusty, chalky, stick to your fingers and clothes and work surfaces. Which actually you don't even notice when you're deep in the process, but do have to clean up eventually - the whole room!
• There seems to be a lot of waste - so much pigment just falls down the paper, and some colours get used up fast. I've been collecting it in an envelope, perhaps to use as a base for another one - waste not, want not, or just Scrooge?
• The results I've had so far are - pastelly, I want to get some bright brights, dark darks - which is possible as I've seen in others' work but not in mine so far.
• I tried quick sketching with them (below) and they were - ungainly, clutzy, although once I stopped trying so hard to control them (got really annoyed!) and let them do their thing, I was happier with the results - in the last drawing. 
• They seem very fragile - you can fix them very lightly with hairspray or fixative, but a heavy coat changes the surface alarmingly. Storing and framing must be a challenge!

I've always wanted to paint this chair with the about-to-bloom cymbidium, and the light behind them - more of this subject to come I hope, if I can stick with it!  (This was a London USkTalks project to use different colour papers, and different to your usual palette)

A Family Wedding

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)

Amazing Olde England

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!

Coming up Roses

The roses at the Botanical Gardens are in full fabulous bloom and I've been wanting to go and spend some time with them and my watercolours all week. Today at last I went and found a lovely spot under a low hanging tree and happily splattered away. I must have blended well into the foliage, at least three wedding parties walked past and nobody seemed to spot me, even when I tried sketching one of the couples as they came down the steps in front of me.














I jotted down notes as I sketched:
'A wedding party nearby... a child laughing as if it's sides would split...
water splashing in fountains. Talking laughing getting louder
then just the fountains. Far away voices and thunder...
tiniest insects that bite like pinpricks... rose smells rose smells.'

Catch her while you can

Half our sitting room has been taken over by a wedding dress, designed and made for a friend by my eldest daughter (the one now in Dubai) and which is now being beaded by her sister, Alexandra. She hardly ever sits around long enough for me to draw her, so I took advantage of her relative stillness to do a quick sketch - ignoring the grumbles - I'm sure one day she'll be glad her mother insisted on immortalising her for posterity!
The dress - actually a coat to go over a simple silk slip - is looking beautiful. It will be travelling to Canada for the wedding. I am starting to get jittery that it will be all finished in time, but am - very slowly - learning to zip my lip, trust that my children are adults and know what they're doing and will in fact get the job done without my twittering on the sidelines!

Papercut

Here is the wedding banner I was working on in the blog below - the wedding was wonderful, moving, and had many of us there determinedly holding back wild joyous sobs, as it was the 'happy second beginning' after long terribly rough times for both the bride and the groom. And the sun shone! - the only day it has for weeks before and ever since. What a cool wet summer we're having... those weaver birds were mistaken when building their nests so low (see previous post).
Anyway, after all that cutting, I haven't started my Christmas shopping - and it's our eldest's 27th (gulp) birthday tomorrow, and the house has spiralled down into chaos, so if I don't post for a while and anyone wanders into this blog, I wish you a very happy Christmas, Chanukkah or whatever it is you're celebrating - and a renewal of all your creative energy for the New Year!