‘Out of our Trees’

Merry Christmas! Here is my yearly christmassy-but-slightly-naughty offering…. Thank you for following my blog and all that 🙂 xxx

Thoughts on Winter

These are a few very much work-in-progress (or even work-barely-started) sketches as I think on a picture for en exhibition entitled ‘Winter’. I wouldn’t have posted these so early, but if I don’t post something else soon, this blog is going to look as if all I do nowadays is Spelling Animals! (There are more of those to come…) I am thinking around naked winter twigs with just a few red berries hanging on after the leaves have gone and, because I like people-things, translating them into the idea of a gathering of Dryads. Stark black against a winter white…

Feline mayhem!

“Noisy guests arrived, and scared the pets” …is the title of this new drawing I just finished. I’m not sure where this one came from, except that I have probably spent too long on Facebook watching compilations of videos of cats, and I had this image in my head of one where a cat that was trying to look big and scary and was arching its back so far that its front feet were right off the ground, and it was walking along like that. And so I spent most of a day failing to convince myself that this idea…

Misbehaving, as clear as Black and White…

I have one more silhouette drawing to show you, which I completed before the Octoparty – I snuck the latter in out of sequence because there really have been a lot of fairies lately, and more to add to the blog. Some years back I did a series of drawings called ‘Fornicating Fairies’… they need no more explanation than that. I then added a drawing to the series where, well, you just couldn’t quite see if…they weren’t… or were they…? You get my drift. I called that one Frolicking Fairies. There was much frolicking. This is along the same lines:…

The Octoparty

This is my latest drawing, another silhouette. I drew a couple of silhouette-type compositions a couple of years back for my ’72 Fairies’ calendar, and found them a bit difficult to get started with, but an interesting idea that I always meant to get back to (and it did help that out of that collection of drawings and paintings those ones were the ones that sold first). So, here I am having another go. I still find this an interesting compositional challenge that in some ways is actually trickier, and just as time-consuming, as working out a composition for an…

Two’s Company

One of the first of some silhouette drawings that I have been doing. I have to say that I thought this picture was rather too sweet for me, but when I posted it on my Facebook page it got more likes than anything has for a very long time, so there, maybe I should be sweeter! I’m not going to change though 😉 Personally, I particularly like the dandelions in the grass, being a bit of a fan of dandelions. I cannot currently think of an excellent title for this so it is going by the name of ‘Two’s Company’ unless…

Merry Christmas!

My apologies for the (almost) lateness of this post! It has been a more-than-usually-full few weeks: several Christmas arts events, the wall of our house falling off (see the posts about the wall for photos, it was quite spectacular!), and Lurgy (early Christmas present from the nieces and nephews) has meant that everything had been rather last minute… even more than usual So… huge sigh of relief! Tree up; guests in; presents wrapped; crackers made; wall back up; house generally liveable-in…. All that remains are a brief few seconds in which to wish you all a wonderful Christmas and the…

Finally February arrives…

The final piece of my 2013 calendar is complete!  Not without slight mishap, I might add. I might have called this post ‘try to make each mistake only once’! First of all here is the drawing: I thought I would give it the same gold-and-silhouette treatment as the September one, partly because two drawings amongst a sea of paintings seemed better than one lonely one on its own, and partly because the drawing for March (coming after this one, as you would expect), has very pale figures with a dark background, so I thought it would be a nice contrast….

Handbags at Full Moon

And so finally the September sketch for my calendar! Two people suggested the moon, as associated with the Autumn Equinox. This confused me as I was under the impression that the equinox is all about the sun and the moon has nothing to do with it… Well of course, this is true: the equinox is simply when day and night are of equal length, and that would all be down to the sun, but, though I’d heard of a Harvest Moon I’d not realized the significance of what the moon is up to at this time of the year. My…