Simon's Blog

I was watching the Girl with the Pearl Earring last night and it inspired me to run off a sketch of the said woman. Initially I wanted to make it a likeness of Scarlett Johansson but this quickly got away from me and as I tried to recover this another woman started to appear who seemed to fit the requirements much better so I went with her. It really is hard this art business, one moment things are working out just right and then the next bang! The whole thing goes wrong. You just have to have faith that you will be able to pull it off in the end.

My art classes start again next week and it will be interesting to see who returns from last year. It will also be interesting to see what they have made, if anything, over the Christmas break. I feel I have moved to the next level, whatever that might be, over this time. Another few months of this and I think I might be ready to take the next leap – painting. Now that will be fun???

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More experimentation. I can now make an acceptable likeness of my father – well at least the last two drawings are turning out like him so based on this I have decided that the aforementioned fact is correct. So much for statistics!

Given this I have decided to work on what the final production will look like. One idea is to make it with pastels so this is what I have been trying out. I have discovered a technique that seems to suit me at the moment. I make the drawing with pencil then shade it using Letraset promarkers (note to Amazon my new order of these has yet to turn up – whine & whinge!). Finally I work on the drawing with pastels. These I blend and rub out and apply and so on until I finish up with something interesting – I find it interesting and really that is all that matters at the moment. The whole process takes about an hour or so but I sully take a break in the middle to give me time to get some prospective on the drawing. Quite an interesting image emerges from the whole process and this is yet another idea to add to the others I have had whilst developing the project. I must admit I am finding whole thing fascinating. The rest of the day I have been working through my photographs. I had cut the selection down to around 60 but then found some more I had missed so I am back to around 80. My target is between 40 – 50 so some serious soul searching is to be had. Deep joy.

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Well the New Year is well under way. People are going back to work – oh how I am glad I no longer have to do that! All we need now is for schools to go back and we will be back to normality. So what I have I been doing? Well most of the morning I have been working on the year book. Looking back at a whole year’s work it makes one realise how one’s life can change. In the afternoon I started working on another sketch of my father. I hadn’t done anything for a couple of days and thought it would be worth while going back to work on him. What a different a couple of days makes. Now I am starting to really understand the face and relating what I remember to the photograph I am working on. I guess this comes from working the problem, not that my father is or was a problem. Well he was but then we all are in our own way.

The photograph here had a lot more contrast than the drawing which in itself is very interesting as it gives me new ideas and possibilities. Funny how life works out.

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I have set my self a new goal, I suppose you could call it a sort of a New Years resolution, only it is not. I am going to make a drawing of my father. Now there are a number of problems with this. The first is that he died nearly four years ago, which is a bit of a restriction but not the biggest problem I will have to over come. The biggest problem is all the emotional baggage you bring when drawing someone you knew really well who is no longer alive (that’s putting it mildly!)

So how to approach this? Well I have no real time constraints so I will make numerous preliminary sketches just to try and get the right look and feel. I am working from a series of photographs I made back in the mid 1970s when I had my first camera. Now here is another emotional baggage moment as my father is the same age in the photo as I am now. Again this is an interesting question – what tense do I use? The photo is nearly 35 years old and so I should us the past tense, yet the image is of a person frozen in time so is it is? Or should it be was? I rathe prefer is even though it may not be grammatically.

Using a photograph as a prime source for the work is also interesting. The photograph has no life it just exists where as the art work will always have life and emotion or at least it should have. Perhaps this is one of the a sons why I am less motivated to make photographs at the moment? I am looking for animus rather than lifeless. Who knows.

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This is straight out of DC comics or Marvel. It was produced by following one of the style guides in my favourite art book of the moment. Isn’t she so evil and Bonesk!

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