Portrait commission

It's been a really creative start to the year. As well the life drawing based etchings, and making three submissions for Small Faces (delivered to the gallery yesterday), I also completed this portrait commission. This is a drawing of the client's mother in charcoal, also delivered yesterday. And it's only 21 January! I'm hoping the year will continue as it has started.

More Small Faces

Three submissions for Small Faces; the graphite drawing already posted, a hand-coloured etching of good old PB and a soft ground etching entitled What We Remember.

An art-filled week

Although last week was a bad one domestically (leaky pipes and plumbers – AGAIN), it was a good week for art. There was life drawing on Saturday - poses inspired by Degas’s intimate paintings of women going about their daily rituals; studio time on Sunday; an intaglio supervised practice session at the workshop on Tuesday which was fun – three people using four different techniques (as technician/facilitator, that kept me on my toes!); on Wednesday I gave someone at work some advice about drawing and critiqued a portrait he was working on, and on Saturday, I received an email from Green Door Printmaking Studio in Derby announcing this year’s international print exchange. A delightfully varied week – rare these days. If only there could be more like those!

Back in the studio

It’s been some time since my last blog entry – too long. That’s a clear indication that I’ve not been doing an awful lot creatively recently. Sometimes life just gets in the way.

Having said that, I had a good day at Red Hot Press yesterday, printing for an open studio event and preparing for a workshop I’m teaching in a couple of weeks.

I also started on a new plate; always an exciting thing. I want to concentrate on improving my aquatinting skills with a series of portraits (self and of those near to me) so the narrative skein of my work is on hold at the moment. I felt really inspired by the quality of the paintings selected for the BP Portrait Awards this year; wonderful technically, compositionally and atmospherically too – almost makes me want to paint! Human faces are an endless source of interest and inspiration so hopefully that will keep me busy for a while.

Back to wood engraving

Portraiture is my thing. Most of my prints have people in them, usually in a portraity way, so I thought I’d continue along those lines for my initial wood engravings. The ones I’ve made so far seem rather too ‘white line-ish’; not something I’m hugely keen on. Hence my next experiment which was an attempt to achieve a more ‘black line’ appearance.

Having drawn the image on the block, I cut both sides of the lines to leave a black line in the middle. At this stage, I proofed it to see what the lines would look like (see right); an interesting image itself.

After that, I continued to cut away until something that looked reasonable emerged (see below left). I think one is supposed to plan the images more carefully – I tend to just get the outline down, then cut in an instinctive way, making it up as I go along. I don’t think that’s how it’s meant to be done...