With summer now in full swing it is time for the sunflowers to bloom. Our sunflowers are looking wonderful and have now replaced these we bought at the supermarket the other day. However, won’t be long before the autumn starts nip at summer’s heels.
We can work it out….
Another day another attempt to master soft pastels and I think I have reasons to be pleased. This wasn’t anything like the previous disaster which is really encouraging. As with any skill you just have to keep working at it and hopefully things will start to eventually improve – well it has for me in the past.
As a bit of an antidote here is another ink sketch I did a week ago for no other reason than I want to include it in my Project LV One collection.
I heard there was secret cord…
Life is a whole series of unintended consequences or is that just me? Continuing my Stephen Fry theme I decided to try once more make a pastel drawing of Mr Fry only it turned out to be a Conté sanguine pencil drawing! So I sat down in the garden and started to draw only to realise that the tonal range of the pencil I was using was very similar to that of the paper I was drawing on. This made the image really quite difficult to see unless you had good lighting – which I did until it started raining and I had retreat indoors. After that it became quit difficult to actually see where I was going to make the next mark. The consequence of all this was that the image you see above is a photoshop version of the original so I ended up with two images – none of which were the one I intended to make when I sat down at the start.
The one creature who was happy that it rained yesterday was this frog. As I was drawing I noticed out of the corner of my eye this frog hop into view and just sit on the step. Oh the joys of working in the open air.
Well I have made it into 3 figures – 100 days already – where did they go?
Yesterday I was feeling pretty miffed about how things went with my pastel portrait of Stephen Fry. Well later in the day I just had to do something to purge some of those feelings so I made this ink drawing of Mr Fry – much more satisfying.
Be thankful for what you’ve got.
“…sometimes you get the bear and sometimes the bear gets you…”
Will Riker – Star Ship Enterprise
Yesterday, oh I believe in yesterday…as the song goes. Well after a couple of really good days I hit the buffers today. Things just didn’t go well and in the end I drew all over the pastel drawing above – such was my frustration. (Photo above has been worked on in Photoshop)
It is true that we learn more from our cock ups than our successes but just at the moment it all seems too painful. Anyway, here is a drawing from the other day – the photo doesn’t really do justice to the drawing – which is always a good sign.
So one step forward and one step back – such is life. I wonder what it is like to be really talented – boring I guess.
I have a love/hate relationship with soft pastels. Some years ago when I was new at this art business I bought myself a set of Sennelier soft pastels which are one of the best brands. What could go wrong? Well everything actually and I ended up with a very expensive pastel covering of the floor. You see I have big hands and I just didn’t understand how lightly you had to use the pastels before they would crumble. Disaster. This somewhat put me off soft pastels.
I didn’t seem to have the same problems with oil pastels which seemed to be able to deal with my heavy handedness (or perhaps I was just getting better?) Anyway, things started to change on the soft pastel front this year as I decided to attend a pastel art course. This was rather fun and so I started to formulate an idea to one day once again try again with soft pastels. Today was that day.
I have learnt an awful lot from making this image. Firstly I am a Conté man through and through. By lucky happens chance I bought a set of Conté soft pastels today and they seemed to perfect for the way I work – in other words they are not too soft. Secondly the colour of the underlying paper and it’s quality is very important. Thirdly don’t give up.
I could go on but I won’t. I’m really pleased with the results, I have much to work on but today has been a good day.
Silence is Easy.
London is a wonderful place – unless you have to live there. The minute you step off of the train you feel the energy pulse through the platform. It clearly is a world city which really has nothing else in common with the rest of the island that it happens to be situated on apart from geography. When you walk the streets of central London in Summer it is awash with tourist from around the world. When you enter any store you realise that most of the people who serve you also come from around the world. Only once did I hear a definitive cockney accent and this was strangely enough from an ice-cream salesman – a very rare thing indeed.
We went to London for the sole purpose of visiting the BP Portrait Award 2014 at the National Portrait Gallery. This is something of annual pilgrimage and this year we weren’t as disappointed as we normally were – someone seems to have let painters in who don’t believe that hyperealism is the only way the capture a likeness. Don’t get me wrong there were still plenty to see, if that is your thing, but they didn’t seem to dominate as much this year. That being said there were two huge canvases that just about sums up what I find problematic with Hyperrealism – unsurpassed ability to copy a photograph but no sense of life in the face. Somewhere along the line the human being got lost.
After this it was time for lunch and as it was near to my wife’s birthday we went for lunch at the NPG restaurant which has one of the most spectacular views of the roof of the National Gallery and the world beyond as you are going to find in Central London. The food was wonderful and the whole ambience of the restaurant made for a great time.
Once the lunch had settled we spent the afternoon strolling through the NPG doing a little light sketching and enjoying the great works of art on display. I know I am biased, given the work I produce, but the NPG is one of my favourite places in London. I liked it so much I became a member, which helped to reduce the meal bill quite nicely.
So London is a wonderful place to visit, wouldn’t like to live their. Fortunately on a Sunday morning it is little more than just over an hours journey away.
I’m knackered! There I’ve said it – I’m only glad that I don’t have to go out to work today as I would be useless. We had such a wonderful time in London yesterday that I guess I might be emotionally drained. I’m now allowed to be emotionally drained.
I didn’t create as many images as I thought but I’m sure they will appear over the next few days so instead you’ll just have to make do with this drawing I made a few days ago. That seems like a life time away.
Another Day.
As I am out all day tomorrow I thought I would get this out of the way – early is better than latter – perhaps. Anyway this is the start of the forth month of the whole project – where did those last three months go?
New York, New York
Simon's Blog 
Interesting Comments
From time to time I get a comment left on my blog. This is wonderful and I thank anyone who does actually does that. However, some of the comments are a little hard to understand which, if English is not the first language of the person making the comment can make the it a little problematic to reply to. Anyone who has spent any time reading my posts will also know that I also mangle my syntax’s, gobble my grammar and generally mash up the language of Shakespeare with the best of them.
Today I received a comment that I really don’t understand at all. I suspect that it was a comment designed to draw me to a cloud computing company web site which I actually followed up, so I guess it worked. Whilst I was going through the web site I came across the YouTube explanation of Cloud Computing by Stephen Fry above. It is a wonderfully interesting and insightful animation, very professional and by the looks of it quite expensive. However, at the end you find out that it has been made by another Cloud Computing company which some what defeats the idea of inserting the clip into another company’s website. If you were looking for a Cloud Computing solution I suspect you are more likely to go to the company that can afford Stephen Fry et al rather than the company which has just used the YouTube clip/advert – I could very well be wrong.
So thank you everyone who might make a comment on this blog, although that isn’t the reason why I run the blog. Thank you to all those people who actually follow the blog – according to WordPress there are 270 of you. Even thank you to all those get better/healthy/wealthy comments that take me to websites/blogs that I would never ever go to in the first place and most probably will never visit again.
Thank you all.