pen and ink
I’m away from home, dog sitting for my daughter in Scotland. also I want to prepare myself for doing some more painting this summer while the group is on summer break.
so I came prepared with paper, pens and ink, charcoal, oil pastels …
pen and ink was my first love in drawing, I was such a fan of Charles Keeping’s illustrations, discovered in Rosemary Sutcliff’s historical novels for children published in the fifties and sixties by Oxford University Press
his drawings are a lot more stylised than this, a good visual education for a young person and fitted into the books’ pages in innovative and surprising ways
I was so stuck on pen and ink I used it as a medium for life-drawing in my first year at art school
you have to go with the mistakes, redraw, and in fact it enriches the drawing
today we went to tentsmuir and the photos I took will be perfect subjects for more minimal drawings
the grey light made the background bleach out
today’s drawing was a little different
a very strong vanishing point pulls the subject together
and miss T the little bedi-lurcher’s ears are so characterful
when I had finished I wanted to go back to the very simple minimal beginning so I did another
I’m learning a lot from these, which are the same size as my paintings, but don’t take as long and can vary the emphasis