Category: Artwork
Hayley Atwell portrait
I’ve used photos as reference, obviously – I don’t have Hayley Atwell on speed dial.
I’ve been finding my portrait drawings not being as good as I want. It’s good to practice things like hands too, but I’m going back to basics with faces and heads. I’ve been studying how favourite artists approach the head. This includes Loomis method – an idealised way used for commercial and comic art. It’s quite magical following this method and seeing pretty accurate 3D heads and faces appear very quickly. Even better, it can be used for real people, to set up a life drawing or portrait sitting quickly and getting a face likeness.
Anyway, I realised I don’t have a systematic way to do portraits and generally just battle with the paint until the face looks OK. Starting fresh, I’m learning about approaches to structure, and in this example, working skin tones. It’s not my best portrait, but I was mainly following a skin tones technique tutorial. I find it useful to practice from well known people as you can find a range of images from different angles to help with understanding the 3D aspects of the face. This is ALWAYS second best to a real life sitting, but good enough for practice.
Snow Drop Inn, Lewes
Arrived early to meet friends for a Sunday roast (legendary… ssh, don’t tell everyone!) and had some time to sit in the sun and scribble.
Scrumped Apples
Scrumped these apples in Youlgreave, Derbyshire. Apple trees everywhere and apples just falling and rotting.
There was an apple pressing session in the Village Hall. Prerequisite old dears in chairs around the edge, having a natter whilst the apples were being hand pressed.
The queue of people with bags and boxes of windfalls got bigger. The pressing was slow business. There were two apple pies in slices for donation. Perplexingly, there was just half a cup of fresh apple juice for donation too. It was delicious, but there should have been more! We were surrounded by hundreds of apples.
I met the man who planted the apple trees I’d taken these from. He planted them 40 years ago. They were not in his garden, but he was delighted the apples would not go to waste.
Image is A3, drawn in Prismacolor pencils.
Happy Birthday
For a man with a moustache…
Moka
Acrylic on LP cover cardboard.
The Trellis
It is a blisteringly cold day. A little bus adventure brings us to Rottingdean. Rottingdean is a quaint little English village near Brighton. “What do you want to do?”, she asks. “I want to go to a tea house with doilies on the table”, I say.
Off we go, and it is not long before we find the Trellis. The restaurant is completely chock a block with chintzy tea pots and more knick knacks than a car boot sale. You can’t look anywhere without spotting a brass cannon, or a ceramic greyhound. Behind and on the counter, precarious stacks of mismatched saucers, tea cups and tea pots.
We choose cake, and a cream tea with scones, made by the owners daughter. It is perfectly divine, along with the steaming pots of tea.
@TheTrellisRestaurant
Onions
Birthday card