Every Day In May: Days 24, 25, 26, 27

I haven't been sketching as regularly since May 23rd, my last post. On Friday 24th I had some pain and the midwife at the hospital told me I need to be taking it easier - I had been trying to clear some of the rubbish my neighbour has left in my garden. So I went to my Mum's for a few days and completely lost track of my EDiMs!  I have managed to do a few of the remaining items from the EDiM list now that I am back in Bristol but I'm also finding that drawing is aggravating the pain in my right shoulder blade so I can't do more than one drawing a day.  To add to that, Domino was run over today and is at the vets on a drip tonight, poor little boy, it's one thing after another with him. Hes certainly using up his 9 lives early in life!

So I basically have just picked one a day at random, the ones that took my fancy the most as I knew I wouldn't be able to do them all before May 31st. I have also done a couple of sketches for recipes which are just in pencil and need painting but I will do that at a later date and post them separately as they aren't EDiMs.  Here are the EDiMs I chose:

#24 'Something That Makes You Laugh'
The baby moves all the time, he is so active. But the other day I could see a little foot (I think) moving across me from side to side. It looked like I had a little mouse trapped under my skin!
Equipment: The trusty cheapo HB retractable pencil.

#25 'Tote Bag'
All my bags are packed for hospital and everything in the house is ready...but now I'M not ready. I'm too tired to have a baby at the moment! I've been waking up thinking 'no I don't have the energy for labour today!'
Equipment: Pen and watercolour

#26 'A Screw'
This was so poignant to my pregnancy! I have so many random screws in my kitchen drawer left over from all the IKEA furniture I've been building over the past few months - a chest of drawers, a bed, a coffee table, a sofa and a wardrobe. Seriously, this baby is going to think he's been born in an IKEA showroom!

I was struggling a bit with drawing this as my 'S' pen wasn't working properly and my back was really sore from trying to do the line work. But then I sat outside in the sunshine and had a brainwave over how to colour it inspired by a bit of mesh I pulled apart as I opened a punnet of nectarines. I was actually going to just use the mesh as a stencil and pull it off after painting but the paint made it kind of stick and so I dug out an old bottle of Diamond Glaze to stick it on properly as I liked the industrial sort of effect it gave it. I really loved doing this!
Equipment: Pitt Pens 'S' 'F' and 'M' (Basically because the S has gone scratchy for some reason)! Acrylic paint in Primary Blue with a bit of Titanium White and Buff Titanium mixed in, The red net from a punnet of nectarines, Judi-kins Diamond Glaze.

#27 'Something Sticky'
I chose this one because it was so cold the other day, for May, that I made a cup of cocoa in the middle of the afternoon! Cocoa on a May afternoon, I ask you! However, as usual I overestimated the amount of time I needed to heat it for and it all bubbled over. Oh well, at least it has forced me to finally clean the microwave!
Equipment: Triplus Fine Liners. I used the fine liners as I knew they aren't waterproof and thought that drawing on the chocolate and then getting the pen wet would reflect the fact that I had made such a mess of making the cocoa!!

I've really enjoyed this EDiM challenge and it has helped me to create a little book of sketches to document the end of my pregnancy.  It has also helped to have been posting into a Facebook group as it is so nice to get comments and to see how other people interpret the daily themes.
I am considering embarking on something for June, the 30 Days of Creativity calender but not sure. I will decide when I wake up on the 1st of June...tomorrow!

Every Day in May: Day 23 - 'Summer Joy'

I have eaten so much fruit while being pregnant so the arrival of something new coming into season is a welcome change. I bought these peaches knowing they aren't going to be the best peaches in the world - it's a cold May and they are from Spain - but they are surprisingly more tasty than I thought they would be. Peaches can be really dreadful if you accidentally get those ones that are dry and never get juicy but just go off in the bowl. These ones are white flesh rather than the yellow flesh ones that will come further into the summer. I must have enjoyed them because I bought them yesterday at around 5pm and within 24 hours have stuffed all but one of them, along with a whole mango!

I really like how this has turned out. They remind me a little bit of the Quentin Blake peach for James and the Giant Peach, not that I am in anyway comparing myself to Quentin Blake just to be clear!!!

Equipment: Pitt pen 'S', W&N watercolours in Cad Red Pale Hue, Aliz Crimson, Yellow Ochre (peaches), Indigo (shading/background)

Slipper and Flip Flops Illustration

I picked up the last couple of things for my hospital bag yesterday. And then I obviously sketched them. They were so cheap - the slippers were £3 and the flip flops were £1. A pound! A pound! And they are as comfortable as flip flops I've spent £20 on in the past! And they smell as good as mty beloved hammer. I have just about resisted the urge to eat them...!

Equipment: Pitt pen 'S', pink highlighter pen, Indigo W&N watercolour (flip flops), Aliz Crimson W&N watercolour, Uniball Signno white gel pen (slippers).

Portraiture - The fifth and final class

I decided to have another stab at acrylics today in portraiture class.  I liked what I produced last week but as this was my final class - really final as I won't be able to sign up for any more art classes for a very long time - I wanted to try and really achieve the type of portrait I've been hoping to get to!

When the model, Chris sat down the teacher noted that he sat with a tilt.  I looked at him and said to the class that I thought the way he sat tilted made him look like a politician - something about his face also made him look like one. So something I really like about how this portrait turned out is that I do think it looks like a portrait of a politician. Not that he is one in fact. If you could see the whole A3 page it is even more evident I think. I left the background unpainted and I think it looks like he has been cut out to be put on a placard or billboard.

Unlike last week, I decided not to mix the colours on the palette. I put a load of Primary Blue acrylic on the palette and basically put down all the areas of the model that were in shadow, regardless of how much shadow they were in. Then I completely washed the brush and put down pure Titanium White on all the areas where I could see the light was directly hitting him. I wanted to take a photo at this stage so I could put it on the blog and also because I actually thought it looked pretty good at that stage - I was almost tempted to just call it as finished there and then! That part only took about 10 minutes.  But I couldn't get to my bag to get my camera as my bump was too big to squeeze betweem the easels and I had a vision of sending them all flying like a row of dominoes.

After that, I worked on putting some of his features in. I didn't want to mix the blue and white on the palette because when I tried it it produced a kind of third colour and when I tried that out on his face it looked flat and lifeless. What I wanted was streaks of the blue and white which merged on the canvas. I'm really pleased with how this turned out, which is a relief as it would have been really frustrating to walk away from my final opportunity to attend a portraiture class feeling like I hadn't managed to produce what I'd been hoping to from signing up for the course.

I'm going to miss this class though. It has been a lot of fun, the other students were really nice, and I'll miss the teacher's comments which have included lines like 'you've made his eyebrows look like an untrimmed hedge', 'you need to give her more brain' 'that's really good! Oh no, actually it's not.'  He's so funny.

I also took a photo of the model this week. It is at a slightly different angle as I stood up to take it but I thought it was about time I had a photo of a model so I can make a comparison!

Here also is my homework practise I did for a pair of eyes in profile:

Every Day In May: Day 20/21 - 'Favourite Drink/Last thing I bought'

My favourite drink at the moment is fizzy water but I drew that for #1 Bubbly. So here is something else I love Pina Colada Snowcones or it could equally be a frozen Pina Colada. Couldn't draw this from observation as we don't have them in Bristol, UK. So I imagined it from memory in this fabulous flamingo glass I bought in IKEA at the weekend. It was only 75p!!!  I did the initial sketch in pencil on Monday and then painted it today. And it took me pretty much all afternoon to paint!!! I wanted to use acrylics as I thought that the texture of the snowcone would be better achieved with the fluffiness of acrylic. But of course I was using my A6 sketchbook, and only one page of it as opposed to the double page sketches I often do. So even with using a very fine brush it was a fiddly process to paint, especially around the lettering and the straw!!

Every Day in May: Day 19 - 'Left Hand'...and Warning...this is the post where I talk about my life...

The prompt was to draw the palm of your left hand but as I had actually got around to doing something with my nails on Saturday, and as I have got a thing about this cheap (£1.50 from Primark) neon ring I bought recently, I did a double page with the palm and the back.

I drew in pencil as all the nail buffing and hand cream had put my hands in a more delicate (in a good way) state. If I'd just been cleaning the house and put them in a more weathered state I probably would have drawn in pen. I coloured the nails with nail varnish (Rimmel) and for the ring I coloured in with a neon yellow nail varnish - which I rarely wear because it might be a great colour but the varnish itself is abysmal! Doesn't go on well, doesn't self-level and chips really quickly. It's from American Apparel. I don't recommend it! Again, the scanner won't pick up the neon which is a shame because I think the neon gives this a really graphic look and makes it obvious why I didn't colour the hands.

There was originally no pink around the background of this, it was just plain sketchbook background. But then I had a bit of a mixed day yesterday which unfortunately came out in my sketchbook. It was actually a really productive day but also, I overheard my neighbour say something about me which really upset me. I won't go on about it here, but in the evening when I was trying to finish this drawing I ended up making a note of what had happened during the day, as I sometimes do in this sketchbook. I really don't want there to be negativity in the sketchbook, like I don't want it in my life because I don't want it to be around the baby. But it has been really evident that during my pregnancy, certain people from different camps have, to be blunt, taken the piss a bit. Basically I see it as that they've used my positivity and the result of the hard work I've done to deal with my situation as an excuse to treat me in a way that I would never dream of treating a pregnant woman, let alone one who is going through a pregnancy alone. Letting me down, piling their own problems on me and not even asking me how I am, expecting me to be able to continue to physically and emotionally deal with things in the same way as I would have done when I was not pregnant and was working full time. The result for my sketchbook was that I guess while I was doing this page something in me thought that maybe an important part of my pregnancy sketchbook was to at some point spell it out more clearly that it's not all roses.

However, I guess pregnancy does bring about emotional waverings and when I woke up this morning I decided 'no', I'm not prepared to have that in my sketchbook. Because people who can't see that a pregnant woman who's been left by her partner should perhaps be cut a bit of slack are just a pitiful bunch. There are other people in my life who have the same level on knowledge about what I've been going through who have been really supportive. They didn't need it spelling out. They didn't need me to be one of those people who cries out 'woe is me', never has a smile on my face, and talks endlessly about their situation in order to have an inkling that as well as all the happiness and excitement of looking forward to having the baby, and alongside all the art classes and sketching, thre is no husband sitting next to me on the sofa to share it all with. When I'm exhausted and it makes my legs and my tummy ache to stand up and walk even a few yards and there's no milk or fruit in the fridge, there's no father of the baby there to jump in the car and pop out to Tesco to get it.  A friend of mine, who is also going to the baby's Godfather, sent me an email a couple of weeks ago. In it he spoke about being Godfather and told me some news about what he was up to etc. And there was also this line where he said 'I know it's not easy for you'. It meant so much to me. Because that's all it takes. And remembering that is the reason why I now have a lovely pretty pink background around this sketch of the hand in my background, which I really really enjoyed painting.

It's strange for me to write this stuff but, as per the usual format, it's the story behind the painting so that's why it is here.

Oh, and here is the painting!

Every Day in May: Day 18 - 'Belonging to someone else'

Okay, so I've got confused and drawn Day 19's theme for Day 18. Nevertheless, here it is 'Something that belongs to someone else'.  'Gosig Mus' is Loxie's favourite toy. He is a mouse from IKEA, although he's really big so more like a rat. I took 'gosig mus' to mean big mouse in Swedish. Lox loves the labels on him, which I left on. If I hold him by his head and shake him so his tail and labels rustle she goes absolutely crazy. I throw him across the room and she runs off and gets him and hurls him around in the air and then brings him back to me so I can throw him again. I love that Gosig Mus has a permanent look of having shrugged shoulders and raised palms in a 'okay cat,  here we go again' manner. Poor thing. I hope that if/when she finally encounters a real mouse it doesn't have to endure what Gosig Mus puts up with!

I really loved drawing this. I initially was going to have it as a pencil drawing as it is a delicate thing but I liked the effect I could get by using the pen in a sort of light, broken way to make him look fluffy and a bit roughed up.

Equipment: Pitt pen 'S', W&N watercolours Cad Red, Yellow Ochre, Indigo.

Every Day in May: Day 17 'First Aid'

It feels like I've had so many ailments over the last few months, particularly in this final month, that a 'First Aid' theme was a good prompt for something to put in this pregnancy sketchbook! I don't usually like to take medicines and I didn't really want to be ploughing them into the baby but I've been so uncomfortable that the ones that are 'baby safe' have been a real relief.

The Peptic Liquid I get through a bottle a fortnight! I had some really horrible pain between my shoulder blades which I initially took for backache but it turned out it was heartburn. Yes, heartburn in your back!?! Paracetamols were my remedy (before I discovered swimming) in the first trimester when the increased production of Relaxin in my body gave me excruciating pain in my hip that meant I couldn't sit down properly and had to change position every five minutes. And the Witch Hazel (which smells like neat vodka) is helping with some strange rash that has come up on my legs).

I really liked this as a simple line drawing and wasn't sure whether to put any colour on as I felt it might spoil it. I think the colour has in fact spoilt it a bit. The plainness of the black and white line drawing made it look fittingly clinical. I should've scanned it before adding the colour!

Also, I am reminded that my back was really aching by the time I was nearing the end of this drawing as the final bit I did, the Witch Hazel font, looks really wonky!

Equipment:  Pitt pen 'S', W&N watercolours, W&N ink in Plum for the magenta circle on the bottle on the left.

Every Day in May: Day 16 - 'Scary Thing'

I wracked my brain to think of 'something that scares me' to draw. I've been so amazed by how fearless I am these days. Even when the cat was missing last week and I was really worried about him, I still held out genuine hope that he would return. I've overcome my fear of blood tests for a start, and that really used to get me in a real state! I have also lost a lot of sleep during my pregnancy worrying about the baby's future, and I was nervous wreck in the days leading up to the scans. But since the first day I knew I was pregnant I have been made more and more aware that his future is all set out and he has a long and happy life ahead of him. However, I am human and I do still get instinctive nervous about things, like today at the midwife appointment when it seemed to be taking an age to find the heartbeat.  So when I got back home I had some lunch and a nap - obviously I needed a nap after walking to the surgery at the end of the road and back and sweeping the floor - and then I did this sketch. I was pleased that the EDiM theme had prompted me to record a midwife trip into my sketchbook.

Every Day in May: Day 15 - 'Pencil'

I knew I was going to have my work cut out with the acrylics at portraiture class today and also would be abandoning drawing with pencil for today as a result so it didn't seem quite right to spend too long drawing a pencil! So I did a super-quick sketch for today's 'pencil' theme. This is the cheapo Papermate Non-Stop retractable pencil I use for all the sketches I do in pencil, apart from the portraiture pencil drawings.

 However...it is neon yellow...and so I coloured it with a highlighter...and have just remembered...highlighter doesn't scan! So I've taken this on my camera.

Equipment: Pitt pen 'S', yellow highlighter.

Portraiture Class 4

In a bid to force myself to not wimp out on painting in portraiture class today, I only took acrylics and cardboard with me to the class, no sketchbook!  This was my first ever attempt to paint a portrait and only the third time I've ever stuck a paintbrush into acrylic. I was pretty daunted!

To begin with I thought this was heading for disaster. I put some paint on the board and just basically had a load of featureless blobs. It looked like a 5 year old's picture. In the first few minutes of the class I had a vision of me ending up at the end with something that didn't even look human! But in the end it has turned out pretty okay for a first attempt I think. Well, its a human.

I painted with a 1/2" flat brush as I had a feeling, based on the type of acrylic portraits I've seen that I like, that broad strokes of paint would suit me more than fiddling around with a little pointy brush. I wanted to do a B&W painting with some of this nice 'Titanium Buff' colour thrown in. I thought I would use it for warm highlights on the face but when I saw that our model for today Natasha had blonde hair and was wearing a light beige scarf, it made a lot of sense to use the buff colour for those elements. Actually, another girl in my class who is also experimenting with acrylics did paint the face mainly in a near identical buff colour although she made hers with a mix of Umber and White.

I do really like the colours I chose. My tutor encouraged me to really be brave with the pure white. I had to reposition her left eye about 25 minutes before the end of the session to avoid falling into my boss-eye trap of last week! I think I could've gone a darker on the right eye. It was very dark to begin with but for reasons even unknown to myself I made it lighter.

An issue I realised I had in the first 10 minutes was that my surface board was too small for working with the flat brush and for the proximity I was to the model. But I really dislike starting again once I've started something, I'd rather just persevere and work with it, so I continued on. I think this turned out to beneficial as it meant I couldn't do my usual wasting time on the model's clothes!

Equipment: Cardboard back of an A4 sketchbook (my 'canvas'), Daler Rowney acrylics in Titanium White, Black and Buff Titanium. 1/2" flat brush (no idea what it is made of). I also used a smaller flat brush for the lips and a very small pointed brush for the eyes. I borrowed those from the tutor so no idea what they were.

Every Day in May: Day 14 - 'Figurine'

I don't have a lot of niknaks as I'm fairly minimalist and don't like to own too many 'things'. I think that's partly my personality and partly the result of so many years of travelling and living out of a backpack.  But contradictorily, I have a couple of collections. One is a pencil collection and the other is puffin objects.

I really think puffins are so cute and they seem like a pretty good sort of bird (unlike ducks!). There is an island kind of near me called Lundy where colonies of puffins descend for a couple of months each year. I've been there twice - and got really sick both times on the rumbley old boat that does the crossing - but I have still never managed to spot one of them! 'Lundy' is named after the puffin as 'lundy' means 'puffin' in Norse. Lundy is the tiniest place and they have their own stamps which instead of the Queen have a puffin on them. My mum has bought me quite a few puffin trinkets and this little porcelain figure is one of them. He is only 3cm high in real life.

 

Equipment: Pitt pen 'S', W&N watercolours in Cad Red Pale Hue (the orangey colour for his beak and feet - I never use this colour so it was nice to get to use it for once),  Cad Yellow Hue and Indigo.

Every Day in May: Day 13 - 'Pillow'

I actually ended up doing three drawings on Monday 13th May. This one, the Oldest Thing in the Fridge, and another one of the chaotic fall-out of my nest-making. This pillow I drew in the evening as I had been really busy in the morning with tidying up and dealing with a few boring things and also all the drawing. I was so tired I fell asleep at 2pm and slept through til 5.30pm. So when I woke up, I was so pleased to have had a rest that the pillow I'd been sleeping on seemed a very nice thing to draw!!

This was done in pencil with a little bit of light watercolour on it and was really nice and subtle but at the last minute I added a bit more shading and it's made it look a bit grubby I think. To be honest, my pillows are so often covered in muddy paw prints at the moment, it's probably made it more realistic! My neighbour who I share a garden with - although actually not because according to the deeds the garden is mine - decided he would do some work on the garden. This has resulted in him digging a flaming great hole, producing 2 x 1 tonne bags of soil, and piling up loads of bags of cement and paving slabs all around the garden. He said he had a week off work and would start and finish it within the week. This was two weeks ago. He did about a day and a half on it and that was it. Loxie thinks the great big muddy hole and bags of soil are a playground of course and so I now constantly have a trail of really muddy paw prints all over the flat, across the sofa, across the bed etc. Plus, the bags of soil are under the washing line so I am unable to wash any of my linen. Everything is permanently filthy at a point in time when I am trying to keep the place as clean and tidy as possible! And of course, IF we get a sunny day, there isn't anywhere now to sit out without being hemmed in by dirt and rubble! Although people seem to think I am a confident person, I am really bad at knowing how to approach people about things like this, especially as the neighbour brought me round a massive bag of baby clothes at the weekend. I don't like upsetting the apple cart. Lucky for me though I have a very formidable mother... as much as I will be dying with embarrassment, I know that if there has been no progress with the garden by the time she next comes to visit, she will be knocking on the neighbour's door (while I hide in the background)....

Every Day in May: Day 12 - 'Oldest Thing in the Fridge'

Reckoning that at thousands of years old, mineral water is the oldest thing in my fridge.I like the top of the bottle a lot and I like that as I had drawn the water droplets with a fine liner which isn't waterproof, when I put the watercolour on they ran a little bit which adds, I think, to the watery look. Not too keen on how the water at the bottom of the bottle turned out. It looks a bit heavy-handed.

 

Equipment: Pitt pen 'S', Berol Fine Markers, Triplus Fineliners, W&N watercolours in a couple of shades of blue and I think a bit of Payne's Grey.

Portraiture Class 3

My back was killing me this week so I struggled with sitting leaning over my board to draw but I didn't think I had any major disaster with what I produced.

I started off with pencil and chalk pencil for the first sketch.

After the break my tutor persuaded me to use one of his graphite sticks and I really like it. I've only ever before used the graphite that is shaped like a pencil but this one I used in the class was a real lump with no pointy edges which completely changed the way I was drawing. I am so used to either using retractable pencils or 'S' Pitt pens for drawing so to use something without a point of any sort was really fun. Looking at sketches 2 and 3 now, I can see that I was a bit hesitant with the graphite at first as sketch 2 is quite lightly drawn but by the 3rd sketch I had got more confident. I really loved the effect the graphite made on my Heavyweight paper for the background. Considering the paper feels and appears to be fine textured I was surprised at the different tones produced. It looks like a brass rubbing.

The model 'Paula' does look a bit boss-eyed in sketch 3. She was falling asleep and her eyes kept closing so I was guessing a bit with her pupils!

Every Day in May: Day 11 - 'Gloves'

Yes, I missed Day 10. The theme was 'creepy' and I didn't want to draw anything creepy in the sketchbook as it is for the baby and I don't want to freak him out. So here is Day 11 'Gloves'. I usually do or at least start or get the idea for my drawing in the morning at the kitchen table and so for this the rubber gloves were an obvious choice as they were right in front of me on the windowsill. I really like the colour yellow at the moment and also, after drawing the hammer the other day, I really wanted to be able to use that 'lemon yellow' watercolour again. And as I wanted a subject matter that would again be relevant for the baby, the gloves were perfect as I spend so much time in them cleaning up trying to keep our home nice ready for his arrival! Plus, the smell of them I find quite addictive due to my oddball pregnancy industrial smell obsession!

I really really like how this turned out and I really enjoyed creating it. It feels harmonious...a continuous line with a Pitt pen and straightforward lemon yellow and Paynes Grey with no faffing around mixing colours are to me functional and no nonsense, like a pair of rubber gloves. It wouldn't have made sense to me to spend time getting every detail of the gloves right with a pencil and then mixing up the exact shade of yellow.  I don't know if I'm explaining myself well.  People have told me I'm a pragmatic person. Even tutors at college. Maybe that explains it. Or maybe the illustration will speak for itself..!?

Every Day in May: Day 9 - 'Lock'

After the fine liner fun of drawing the bag of coffee I wanted to use those Triplus fine liners some more! Drawing the little padlock on my diary was an obvious choice for a lock to draw as it is exactly the same bright fuschia colour as the pink in that pack of pens which I love so much. It is such an intense colour. I also drew the diary attached to it. I've been keeping this pregnancy diary since the start of the year so it made sense for it to be in this sketchbook too. And there are of course kittens on the front of the diary.

Something interesting I found when drawing the writing and the kittens was that although my first instinct was to turn the diary around and draw them upright, that actually didn't work out and it was much easier to turn the diary back around to its original sideways position and draw the cover sideways. I'm taking that as a good sign that I am in a good habit of drawing observationally.

Every Day in May: Day 8 - 'Coffee Pot'

When I did the sketch of Domino yesterday I used a black Aquarelle pencil that was to hand. I've had this tin of them for years but never used them, quite frankly I never quite understood them. I imagine that they are good because they can produce something like a waterolour result but are less messy to carry around??  

I decided to try them out for theme #8 'Draw a Coffee Pot'. The sketch itself took a while because basically as I have recently come to realise, I don't think I'm especially gifted at drawing things that are round! I never seem to make the curve curvy enough.  So that combined with this being my first ever attempt with the Aquarelle pencils resulted in this drawing taking AGES!!!  It was only going to be a quick sketch because I knew I needed to catch up and do #9 as well!  I don't think these Aquarelles are for me really. I know that learning to use any medium well takes time, but I do usually find that I know from the start whether I like something or not. For instance, Promarkers loved them from the first moment I picked one up, charcoal made me cringe the first time I used it and has done ever since. 

I like how the filter turned out but that's probably because that was the part of the cafetiere I did last

I wanted to draw my coffee too as if this Swiss Water Process stuff didn't exist I wouldn't have been drinking coffee at all over the past few months. It's not easy to find, they don't sell it in the supermarket but fortunately a deli opened up on my high street recently which sells it. I reverted to using my trusty fine liner pens for the bag of coffee! Much quicker and more enjoyable personally. Oh, and it does say 'decaf' on the label, it's not that I couldn't fit it in!

Equipment: Aquarelle watercolour pencils (cafetiere). Triplus Fine Liner pens (bag of coffee).

Every Day in May: Day 7 - 'Freebie'

I haven't posted for a few days as I've been really worried and upset because one of my cats 'Domino' went missing on Bank Holiday Monday.  Thankfully, the little beast turned up howling under my window at three o clock this morning. There are benefits to being a light sleeper and living on the ground floor! I couldn't believe it when I opened the door and he came running in squeaking. It was like seeing the Archangel Gabriel at the door!!  He is Loxie's twin brother who lives with my Mum but was staying with me. He doesn't know Bristol at all and I think he went off and probably lost his tracks. He was very hungry and disheveled when he turned up and has been sleeping and eating lots since his return but he seems fine. Goodness only knows what he's been up to for three night on the mean streets of the city, only him and his maker will ever know!

Anyway, on Tuesday I had started the theme for Day 7. It was a beautiful sunny day and I sat outside to create a lovely sunny pen and watercolour of my flat. But it was at this point that I was starting to worry about how long Domino had been gone and gradually my sketch was getting darker and darker. Instead of looking light and sunny I inadvertently put in really heavy shadows and over-hatched the door. The Stones song 'Paint it Black' springs to mind! Without meaning to I've made it look like there is a big old cloud of doom hanging over our home, which there obviously was! It's funny how your state of mind comes out in your artwork. I've noticed it in myself before and witnessed it happen to other people to.

Here is the result of my attempts at sketching that day. I've also included the little celebratory sketch I did of Domino curled up asleep in my wardrobe amongst my shoes today all content and happy to be home. It's a bit of an odd sketch as I used a black Aquarelle pencil for the sketch which I'd never drawn with before.

Every Day in May: Day 6 - 'Scented'

Today's theme was to draw something perfumed or scented. So I'd better explain my interpretation of this one! Yes, it is a hammer, and the handle smells really delicious...to me! It has a kind of rubbery/chemically/creosote smell and in my pregnancy I've become really obsessed with it. It lives in my kitchen drawer and every time I open the draw I breathe in because I love the smell so much! I mentioned in an earlier post that my granny loved the smell of welly boots when she was pregnant so it might be a family thing, or maybe it is along the lines of the supposed desire pregnant women develop for wanting to chew coal. Whatever it is, an illustration of this hammer had to be part of this pregnancy journal!It is the black part, not the yellow part that smells nice.

Equipment: Pitt pen 'XS', W&N watercolours. I really like that the yellow came up so bright. It looks nice and industrial which fits with the idea of a chemically smell.

Every Day in May: Day 5 - 'Fir Tree'

This is my little potted Christmas Tree. I got him for Christmas 2012. It was my first Christmas in my flat and at the time my living room hadn't been decorated so this little guy with a few lights on really cheered the place up. He now sits outside my kitchen window catching some rays and getting some fresh air until I bring him in next year. He is only about 2 feet high and I'm hoping he will be with me for a few years to come, the baby and I will be able to watch him grow over the years.

My mum was staying for the weekend so I didn't have much time for drawing, hence I did this as a continuous line drawing and sploshed a little bit of watercolour on at the end. After I had drawn him I noticed the interesting pattern his shadow was casting across the page on the left so I traced around it and coloured that in too. I really like that part of this actually.

Equipment: Pitt pen 'S', W&N watercolours in sap green and lamp black, Seawhite A6 sketchbook

Every Day in May: Day 4 - 'Socks'

I'm a bit fed up with the sight of my socks at the tail end of this neverending winter. I've managed to wear my flip flops at last this week so I really didn't want to be drawing my wretched socks! And as this EDMay thing is a baby diary thing and I'm sure my own socks aren't a massive feature of my pregnancy, I decided to draw some of the little socks my cousin sent me. When I first saw them I couldn't believe how small they are! To be honest, I can't believe how small babies are!  My mum is coming to stay this weekend hence why I had completed this by 6.30am before she arrives!

Equipment: Retractable pencil (to keep a fine point), W&N watercolours in Lamp Black, Paynes Grey, and Ultra Marine, Seawhites A6 Travel Journal

My Little Assistant

Every time I use the scanner to post all these sketches, I find I have a little assistant. I spend the whole time trying to persuade her not to stick her paw under the lid of the scanner. The whirring noise of it is all just far too enticing to a kitten!

Every Day in May: Day 3 - 'Joy'

Theme for today is 'Draw something that represents Joy'. Joy for me had to be something related to the baby so I drew his first bunny. It was the first thing bought for him really early on way before you're supposed to start buying baby stuff. I think it was even before I'd had the scan. But I saw this lonely bunny on a shelf in a shop and he had a torn foot. It made me cry and so my mum went back to the shop and bought him and sewed his little foot up.

He is sleeping in the bottom drawer waiting for the baby to arrive so he can be his little best friend and snuggle up to him. 

Equipment: I wasn't too sure how to get across his fluffiness but I went with sketching him really loosely and lightly in pencil and then sploshing on some watercolours. He is a bit more cream than the yellowy colour I've used but I was trying to get the highlights and shadows on his fluff. Funnily enough, as I was putting the colour on his face, I realised that it felt like I was doing some practice for portraiture class so I may have inadvertently got over my fear of colouring in faces! 

He is a little bit fuzzy in places as the Seawhite A6 sketchbook, although good at handling water for a travel journal, isn't technically a watercolour sketchbook so he's a little bit cockled! 

Bearing in mind that he was bought with a tear in his foot, I like that he looks a little bit disheveled, it suits him. 

Every Day in May: Day 2 - 'Sound' (and first ever attempt at painting with acrylics)

I misread the theme for Day 2 as 'Draw a favourite smell'. I was very excited about this as I knew exactly what to draw and it would fit in perfectly with my sketchbook being a pregnancy journal as I have been obsessed with the smell of a hammer in my kitchen draw! On re-inspection later I realised it was a favourite 'sound'. I was pretty stuck with this as the things that are my favourite sounds are things like the sound of the baby's hearbeat, Loxie chirruping, rain on the window i.e. all things I've drawn very recently. But then as I was sitting in the garden underneath the very blossomy tree that was covered in more bees than I've even seen, I realised how much I was enjoying the combination of the sound of the buzzy bees and the sound of the city. I know a lot of people dislike the sound of the city but I really love the hum of traffic, sirens, aeroplanes overhead etc. So I decided to just draw what I could see from where I was sitting...

'The Sound of Summer'

The added bonus of putting this composition to paper was that I knew I was going to have to draw a lot of white for all the blossom and this has forced me to finally crack open the acrylics. I drew in pencil and then painted bits of the drawing. I didn't want to paint the whole thing. I also thought there was a strong possibility I might really mess this one up so used the final page in my Moleskine - the one I had covered in brown paper. As it turns out, I'm now kicking myself that I didn't just use the next page in the new Seawhite sketchbook. My line of thinking with this 31 days of drawing is that it will have lots of pregnancy memories in it and I will be able to give it to the baby when he is older. A painting of our garden would have been a really nice thing to have in it!

I'm annoyed with the scanner again as it has scanned this so fuzzy that it has obliterated the bees! What am I doing wrong, I don't know. Also, the wall in the garden is white but I didn't paint it because I wasn't sure how it would look against the blossom and the walls of the houses. But now that I look at it again, I think I really should've gone ahead and painted it white.

 I feel pretty inspired to take these acrylics along to portraiture class next week now (and to actually use them). I now understand what people say about them being fast drying though! Especially as I was painting outdoors!

Portraiture Class Week 2

I have had a few practice attempts at home to test out how I might get on with adding some colour or  Indian ink to my portraits. But by the time class came round today, I freaked out about my ability and ended up doing pencil drawings for the second week running. But the trouble is that I'm not that keen on drawing in pencil. I do the line drawing and then don't really know what to do with the shading. I'm finding drawing in pencil really helpful though as it means I come out of the class with a drawing that after a bit of maneuvering around of the features looks like the model. So in that sense I've achieved what I set out to do. But then I also am overworking the drawing at times because once I've got the features in place I feel like I'm done with it. But I definitely need to do something different next week now. Not least because I bought really nice heavy paper to be able to take ink or paint and all I've done is draw on it with pencil!!

On another note, our model this week 'Ben' was nuts! He was listening to music on his phone with headphones and kept taking his phone out and fiddling with it. Then at one point he decided he wanted to take a photo of us all drawing and got up to go and get his camera!! The tutor was like 'erm, could you wait til they've finished drawing you, please?!'

Anyway, here is what I did...
Drawing One: A little continuous line drawing I did of the model while waiting for everyone to arrive and the class to get started.

Drawing Two: I chose to sit right at the side of the room so that I could get a full on profile view as that's what I think I'm most hopeless at drawing. He did start out with my usual sticky out chin but he ended up looking pretty much like the model.  It was a really sunny day and the light was over all of his face so I couldn't see a lot of shadow to put in.

Drawing Three: After break, in an attempt to use something else from my pencil case, I moved to the other side of the room from where there was lots of light and shade on the model's face and I got a piece of grey paper from the tutor and used my chalk pencil. The man at the next easel was very interested in my chalk pencil and said he is going to buy one.

Everyday in May: Day 1 - 'Bubbly'

So I'm doing a little challenge thing through the EDM Facebook page. It is Everyday Matters in May 2013 and basically, a lady in the group has written a list of 31 things to draw and each day this month you draw what is on the list for that day and post it to the Facebook group page.

 Day 1 is 'Draw something bubbly'. As this is the final full month of my pregnancy and as I have a practically brand new sketchbook I've decided to use the daily prompts to draw things that will be meaningful to me when I look back on my time carrying the baby, hence for today I drew a glass of fizzy water with a chewed straw.

I'd been to portraiture class earlier in the day and so had been all about accuracy and detail so, believe it or not, every single bubble in this is a bubble I saw in the glass. There was no random drawing of bubbles in this illustration, each and every one was carefully observed, I know, tedious right?! My favourite bit of this is the bubble inside the straw near the top.

Equipment: Retractable pencil - good for keeping a permanent point for the bubbles, my new Seawhite A6 travel sketchbook, W&N watercolours in red and blue (will have to check which ones), lamp black, yellow ochre. This was a bit of a gamble putting the watercolour on as I haven't tried it on the paper in this new sketchbook before. The paper in it is I think different to my other Seawhite sketchbook. But good old reliable Seawhite took to the watercolour really well.