It’s been a busy few weeks for the 5PM Challenge, which if you’ve not seen my Instagram or my previous post is a self-set challenge where I draw or paint (the rules of the Challenge formerly known as the 5PM Drawing Challenge are intentionally loose) every 5PM for at least 5 minutes – but as you can see here, that’s rarely the case! These aren’t all the works from the last two weeks but the best ones as a highlight of what I’ve been upto. Rather than go through them chronologically, it makes more sense as I’m only showing highlights to group them thematically.
First up is the first self-portraits of the challenge, working on my new Seawhite A5 sketchbook which I bought because I needed a small portable sketchbook and my previous ones were either tiny or getting full. I’d just got the Molotow H127-EF (extra fine) and Posca white pens, and recently discovered that you could use the Jackson’s and Winsor & Newton inks in an empty fineline pump marker. So this is a study in that, if rather glum. The laptop makes it look like a mugshot, oddly.
The last few weeks have been the return of the abstract drawing.
I hinted at that in the previous post but I wasn’t sure where it would lead. After not so great attempts at a word/graffiti piece I then spied my Pigma Micron 0.5 colour pen set which I’d tried to use on figurative work and found the colours too bright and the large Posca didn’t translate to the small Pigma which was the idea. But then I thought of trying to do one of my large pieces as a small A4 or A5 scale, using my idea of overdrawing and overlaying as discovered in the Daisy Life Drawing session. That worked MUCH better, and oddly reminded me of the counterfoil and design of banknotes.
I recently did another piece below as well using this same overlaying/overdrawing technique, which I think is even better. Both of these pieces although they basically start as overgrown doodles remind me of imaginary landscapes – and unlike Gainsborough who had to use vegetables and pebbles for his, I can just take a line for a walk!
Also did this piece on a bus, and as it was the day before attending the British Library Electric Storm at 50 talk as part of their Delia Derbyshire Day, I named it in honour of one of her best works. As a tangent – which according to David Vorhaus was one of her worst/best features – I also did a portrait of Delia in the Radiophonic Workshop on the way to the gig on a packed tube train. Not an easy place to draw!
I was really please to see when I got up to leave that the young woman sitting next to me was playing or composing with a synthesiser on her phone. The next generation?
Obviously given my tube drawing, I’d not stopped working on buses and trains – in fact “Green Veils’ was started on a bus going into London and finished on a bus going back. As I joked to a friend – the bus is my office! And studio and subject, sometimes. Like in this drawing of the reflection in the bus windows. As you might have guessed from all the river work, I am obsessed with reflection and illusion, how windows become mirrors and you get another world ‘through the looking glass’, an Upside Down, literally.
Given the crappy weather, still life has been a life line for this challenge. If I’m still doing it in Spring and Summer, it will get easier in some ways, but there are things I need to practice and exercise (or exorcise even, explaining my past art education history and how much damage it has done to my creative process, a friend exclaimed that I had a lot of demons!).
One of those ‘demons’ was my scratchy style, mocked as ‘chicken scratch’ by my teachers…another is glass and fabrics. So I setup a still life series I’m going to call ‘Tragedy is Comedy’ after the Halloween Mask I used, and scarves I brought back from Egypt or found in the street. I used my Pentel Brush pen on one, I love that pen…and woodless charcoal on the other. I found that for £2 at The Works and it’s ace. It’s charcoal with a coating so you don’t get your hands dirty, and a sort of mix between graphite and charcoal, or a more controllable compressed charcoal. I have bought some more online!
The most successful was the black and white pastels – remember them? on black paper. I found my pad of larger coloured paper, so expect more of these…I think still I need to work on modelling fabric (colour plus tonality in black and white with shadows? Ouch!) but I did catch the shininess of the mask well.
Another still life setup was this friendly fellow who I added an Xmas Ornament – yes they have been up since last year so no bad luck which is basically a mini disco ball. I love disco, so the Angry Disco Gnome I guess is another self-portrait, as friend quipped! I originally just did the drawing and was rather exhausted by it, but then added the watercolour a few days later.
Heffalump is a small sculpture I bought in Africa about a decade ago and gave to John, and it’s companion who it was decided is called Kat Man was probably brought from Kathmandu around 30 years ago. They live in the bathroom together.
The last still life was for John, he wanted me to paint his Lindt Lindon box and I obliged after originally saying no because of the complexity of the design. Getting the red right was hard, as was the gold ink which refused to play ball, and I am glad I masked certain bits because I had to lay quite a few watercolour layers to get the intense colour. Text is NOT my strong point! It also was an exercise in pencil drawing, sadly I didn’t take a picture of the interim, but it was drawn out quite precisely first in Stabilo All Graphite pencil.
He filmed me doing part of it as well:
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