Holiday research

Only two 'sleeps' until we head to France and (please, please!) better weather. I have cracked open my new watercolour Moleskine to make some notes. We are going to the Ardeche region in the southeast. As you might discern from the map below it's not got anything (cities, landmarks) super-famous in it but that (I hope) is part of the charm. It's one of the least populated areas of France and full of gorges, rivers, forests, weird rock formations and picturesque villages.

But it is France, so obviously there's going to be some wine...

 And I even may get to do something cultural in between the boozing so I've been trying to increase my knowledge of French history a teeny bit. (I was about to say 'fill the gaps but it's less of a gap than a gaping void. The little I know about France pre-4th Republic I've learnt from the Sharpe novels. Tsk, tsk and hang head in shame).

 

First haircut

Christoph gave Elaine her first haircut the other week. Due to the way her thicker toddler hair is growing in she has a natural mullet (she is half German so I suppose it was inevitable) but at least now it's a well-groomed mullet. I decided to boldly use a pen so it's not the most flattering portrait (for some reason Christoph here reminds me of Fagin from Oliver Twist). However I wasn't much kinder to myself in my quick watercolour effort: nice shadow 'tache!

 

Cute pot-belly

 Day 18 of the Blogtoberfest challenge (are we nearly there yet??)

Almost halfway through Blogtoberfest and an exciting incident.

Thursday's sketchbook page which I'd unintentionally missed out. The most exciting thing on that day? One of my deep personal fears happened...to someone else! Yup, a woman farted really loudly during pilates. Oh, the relief that it wasn't me!

Profile sketch

This is a preliminary sketch for an acrylic painting. (In other words, I'm posting this sketch because I'm too tired to start painting now. Have left it too late tonight. Too much faffing).

Lenzfried church

I struggle with architectural drawing. It takes me ages and generally looks disappointing despite the effort. Did this sitting in the car yesterday in the near-constant rain. In German this type of spire is called an onion tower which is quite fitting.(Have just checked the translation and apparently we also say onion - onion dome or bulbous spire. Hmm...ignorant in two lanugaes!)

Conkers

It's literally raining conkers in Kempten's parks at the moment. On Friday we were at Elaine's new baby singing group. I know, I know...I previously had my doubts about parents who dragged their babies to such things but then I previously thought all babies were anti-social little lumps who liked to stay at home, in trusted surroundings, avoid change and placidly chew on a designated chew toy. Not this baby. Action! Music! Kids twice my size! Strange men! Unknown environments! Potential danger! That's what I like. Anyway, one of the songs had a conker in it's shell as a prop. Something about Mr Conker coming out of his house, etc. The singing teacher has told us we will be given sheets of lyrics at some point. I have never heard any of these songs before in my life so try to hum tunelessly along to show willingness. I suspect the teacher thinks I'm a bit thick. "I'll try and sing slower, next time" she said. I did explain that I understand everything, I just don't know the words but I don't think she was buying it. Meanwhile Elaine was attempting to stuff Mr Conker and as many members of his family as possible into her gob. Rock n roll.

Fish sauce and tamarin

It's about 10pm. Have been soaked twice - once on the way to Pilates and once and the way back. From the TV I can hear Simon Cowell beckoning me over have a cookie and watch him shatter some dreams. Bad man. Must draw something...anything...quickly...

Zzzzz....

I'm not saying that naptime is my favourite time of day....but it's in the top five, that's for sure! Unfortunately gave her a bit of a piggy nose here!

The final body in motion sketches

...from the weekend course. Again the model did a mini choreography of non-stop but repeating movements for about 5-10 minutes. In the first example I tried to capture separately three movements from the sequence and in the other examples I overlaid the movements.

Watercolour using a brush then a brown watercolour brush pen

Watercolour, pastel, black conté pencil

Pencil, brown Pitt pen

 At the end we all spread out our work from the past 3 days (or what could fit in the space) and had a little gallery/critique session which was nice. This is our wonderful model, Nadine, checking out some of the sketches.

 

Blogtoberfest starts today!

Following my blog-mentor (not to be confused with tormentor!) Sarah's good example in 2011, I'm joining in Blogtoberfest. The basic idea is that you write a blog post every single day in October. For more information about it, click on the sidebar button. The plan is that this will force me into drawing at least one thing every day. How difficult can that be.....?

Fortunately, for the first few posts I can rely on my backlog of pictures from my 'Body in motion' life drawing course. In these examples the model did a relatively simple, large movement (e.g. rotating her arm) over and over again. We were to try and 'superimpose' images one on top of the other to represent the movement.

 

The body in motion

Last Friday to Sunday I participated in a life drawing course which was entirely focused on the moving body. I.e. the model didn't stand still for 10-20 minutes at a time as is normally the case in a life drawing class. Yes, it's as difficult as it sounds and, at times,extremely frustrating. We had an excellent teacher - Georg Kleber - and I really felt I had learned a lot by the end. The downside is that not many 'pretty' pictures came out of the learning, but that's not really the point.

We spent quite a long time 'warming up', doing stick figure drawings of the moving model. The idea was to draw the direction of the movement rather than the actual model. Next we did kind of 'sausage' figures. The model posed for 30 seconds at a time. We had an amazing model who is a dancer. She moved so gracefully and was so flexible that quite often I wasted the 30 seconds with gawping and wondering how she could get her foot behind her ear. (Incidentally, I found concentrating on doing only one thing all day - without any interruptions! -  quite a shock to the system after being in 'baby land' for so long. On the first day I was so exhausted I had to go to bed 2 hours earlier than usual).

We filled sheets and sheets of these kind of sketches

The model then did a constant sequence of three movements and we had to draw the three poses. Here's one example:

 
 Next we were told to stop concentrating on drawing the outline of the body and focus on mass and the direction of movement. If we had time, we could add definition lines. I didn't realise how obsessed I am with drawing outlines until that point! Again, the model created a mini choreography of movements which she repeated over and over again for about 5-10 minutes. I worked with pastel/conté pastel to get the rough movement. And then, yes, in an almost OCD manner, added definitions lines....ok, I outlined the figures. Couldn't help myself!

 I did manage to move away from outlining (a tiny bit) as the course went on...as I'll show in my next post.
What a cliffhanger!

Another sketchbook finished!

And I only started it in May! Uh...May 2010 that is (hangs head in shame). I did work in other books simultaneously but it's still pretty pitiful. I will do better in my next one!

The last few drawings were...can you guess? Yup, baby-related.

A fairly futile attempt to sketch Elaine from life. She never stops moving.

Coloured pencils used for 'Dino' the baby walker/ride on wonder

Finally nap time!

Not posted upside down - this is how I draw it. Standing, looking down into her cot.

Here's a couple of my favourite pages from the book. We visited the Yukon for a canoeing trip in September 2010. It was an amazing holiday. At home I painted a few of the buildings in/nearby Whitehorse which had caught my eye.

A B&B in the centre of Whitehorse

A cabin near the lake where the float planes land

The local cinema - very cool. Unfortunately there were no good films on.

Naked strangers

The second post in one week: I'm on fire! Well, slightly singed at the edges anyway. A phonecall with a friend last week was so totally devoid of good craic on my side (due to my contented but current very un-chatworthy life) that I realised I had to do something. When your most exciting piece of news is that baby pooed in the shower..twice...you know you're scraping the bottom of the barrel (or in my case, shower). 
I did consider a few days in a spa hotel but (possibly foolishly) I plumped for a 3 day art course instead:Akt in Bewegung It's life drawing, but the theme is 'movement' so...uh...presumably the models move. Expect many pictures of squiggly lines and frustrated brushmarks. It's not until the 23 of September so I could always try and practise beforehand. After consideration, the course probably won't be a great conversation piece: "So what did you do at the weekend?"
"I stared really hard at naked strangers...and got my hands all dirty with charcoal." 
Still, I think I'll enjoy it.

On Sunday I wandered out and sat on the Art Nouveau fountain in a square nearby to draw one of the bronze statues on it. Can you guess what it is?

 

 

That's right! (ahem). It's a merboy, playing a shell-flute and sitting on a stag. Obviously. Here's what the real thing looks like from a more normal angle:

 

It is a lovely fountain.The figures represent water signs apparently.Maybe I'll get around to drawing the other three at some point (but sitting on this side of the fountain means more people can see me...eek).

Elsewhere this week...
Elaine got her first pair of leather shoes, specifically for crawling in the dirt:

 She doesn't have one foot freakishly larger than the other...that's my artistic interpretation (cough, cough)

She was overwhelmed with excitment on seeing the new shoes.

 Finally, a sneak preview of the ridiculous comedy outfit I'm sewing for her birthday on Halloween.

This is the practical version of the outfit. A tutu is also in planning. (Mwah-ha-ha-ha).

 

Imagine how it looks inside my head

This week has fairly zipped by and yet I'm not quite sure what I've done with my time. The weather was sunny and hot (28 celcius +) at the start of the week but the person in charge must have had a sudden panic ("Arghh...1st of September is the official start of autumn...get that temperature down now...NOW!") and so now it's only about 12-15 degrees. Not horrendously cold but a bit of a shock to the system after the sweaty days of last week.

For some reason I decided that this ideal cold-catching weather heralded a good day to take Elaine to the extremely busy swimming pool. She was almost freaked out by all the noise and people, even when we sat in the toddler paddling area.  But then a yellow plastic watering can floated within grasp and she was as happy as a pig in manure. Following the manure line of thought whilst watching the frolicking cherubs I realised we were doubtless sitting in a solution that must be at least 50% urine. I managed to push that idea to the back of my mind. It did pop back when, with a sudden rush of motoric skills, she filled up the the can, grasped it like a mug and poured all the water down her throat. Mmm, yum. Here's some other stuff she likes stuffing down:

 



 She's not walking yet but standing up is no problem:

 

 The other evening I was in my usual dithering mode...should draw/tidy/clean kitchen/cook something/read/do exercise/phone...etc..etc. Instead of dealing with the general chaos I decided to draw some of it, namely the sofa bed in my 'hobby/dumping' room. Now that this is going public I may be shamed into doing something about it all!



Just a quickie...

It's Sunday and I am planning on doing some drawing today (honestly) but thought I better get a quick post out during naptime.

This page is all I've managed since the last post:

Note chubby, oats-covered hand of my 'photographic assistant'.

As you may have guessed from the subject matter, I have been spending most of my free time (i.e. bed- and naptime) attempting to sew stuff. A week or so ago I finally completed the growth chart. It was my first ever attempt at...I hesitate to say 'embroidery'...let's say 'hand-stabbing cloth with needle and thread'...but I'm happy enough with the result. I didn't even attempt hand-stitching the binding I just went with an artistic (cough, cough) wavy machine stitched line. But despite dubious technical execution the lovely Echino fabric saves the day.

Many thanks to Sarah at Narcoleptic in a cupboard for the design tips. (Don't stare at the binding Sarah...it'll make you queasy!)

If you don't have anything worth saying...draw

I don't have much to say for myself today and, as my mother used to frequently tell me: "If you don't have anything worth saying, don't say anything at all!". (To be fair to her, this statement usually came during a long exchange of colourful verbal abuse between my brother and myself). So here are some drawings.

I still haven't made up my mind. Is it better to draw with lots of detail from a photo, erasing allowed...
(Elaine from a photo)

Or do what people like Danny Gregory suggest; only draw in pen, no corrections possible...even when it results in dodgy proportions...
(Elaine sleeping, bum in air - from life)



Or stick with pencil but don't rub out because you're too lazy to go and find an eraser...?
(Some kind of orchids from life, with watercolour)

Excuses, excuses...

1. I was on holiday and was sociable
2. I had a vomiting bug
3. I had a huge pile of paperwork when I got back
4. I got a nasty cold which somehow got into my eyes so they were oozing pus
5. Nap times require so much energy to be enforced that I barely get any benefit from them
6. It is my patriotic duty to cheer on Team GB in any Olympic fixtures they are competing in
7. It would be jingoistic not to cheer on all other teams in random Olympic sports which I barely understand
8. I procrastinated. A lot.

Feel free to select any or all of the above 'reasons' for me not having posted in about 6 weeks. I can only hang my head in shame while promising to do better in the future.

This typical procrastination makes it all the more amazing that I finally finished a sketchbook...in less than a year! (I think I've only managed this feat once before; sad, but true).

Sitting on a beautiful quilt made by Sarah of Narcoleptic in a cupboard

 I think it helped that it was themed: Pregnancy and the first months after the birth. As I was making a record for myself I didn't worry so much about trying to create 'good' drawings as such. On the last page I recorded the attachment of the dreaded breast pump. Now there's an object to stop me getting too sentimental about the whole business! I felt so guilty for a long time about all the breast feeding problems I had but I've put it all behind me now. Mainly because I've realised there are continually new things to feel guilty about! Excellent. The lower part of the bottle in this picture is unscrewed from the top 'pump attachment' part and can be sealed with a screw on lid. I put some dried pasta in the bottle, screwed on lid and gave it to baby Elaine to play with.

 

She hadn't played with it for weeks until today. Somehow she managed to unscrew the top and I came upon her sucking on each of the pieces of dried penne before (thank God) spitting them out. This follows yesterday's picnic of grass, clover, a handful of sand and one large pebble which she enthusiasically sucked on for some time before I managed to hook it out, nearly losing a digit in the process.

I've not started a new sketchbook as such...I still have my travel moleskin (started in 2009...the shame!) but I cunningly left it at my parents in Scotland so won't get my hands on it before Halloween. I have a Paperchase one here to finally finish off. It's full of random stuff and I imagine it will continue that way. Plus I have a watercolour pad.
Here are the only two drawings I managed to complete in Scotland:

From the window of the Manse in Lybster, Caithness. It rained almost non-stop for the 3 days I was there.

More rain the next week kept me inside. The grandfather clock in Kilmorack House, the holiday house we rented with friends for a week

Finally, to prove I made an effort (once!) to do a drawing outside. I went to draw the old Kilmorack church and pushed on despite the rain starting...and then my pen dried up (yes, I'd only brought one). I took that as a sign and went back for tea and chocolate gingers.



Foiled again...