Last week's pencil drawing on manuscript paper turned out to be a good study. Needless to say I am most happy with the choices and decisions I made, the drawings are now positively singing to me. This is the first completed musical drawing for Open Eye Gallery's On a Small Scale winter exhibition. I think I am going to title it Polka - that's what came into in my head when I was drawing this, and it definitely looks like there is dancing going on, maybe a polka, or an eight-some reel or strip the willow?
It's interesting to see how, from a distance, this does resemble sheet music.

The latest drawing in my new series of work. It was impossible to take an evenly lit photograph today in spite of excellent iPhone, the drawing is more delicate than it looks in the above photo. I tried scanning but I couldn't get the scanner to work in a typical day of technology versus me. After spending the morning investigating drivers and repeated attempts to make a scan, B fixed the scanner just by looking at it, urgh! so annoying. However, the scanned details shown below are much closer to the original.
It's plain to see I would much rather be drawing than photographing and publishing them. On that subject, there has been quite a commotion in the artists' quarter of Instagram recently ...

Work began on Monday drawing into the frottage plant prints I made the previous week. Here we have four details (above) and two drawings in their progress so far. I'm pleased with how the work is going, but thought I may have got more done than I did.

I didn't actually get that much time to spend drawing every day, in fact a couple of days saw no drawing at all because I spent a lot of time in the real garden this week. A dry, warm weather front came in following heavy rainfall during previous weeks. The soil dried out rapidly and watering was required nearly every day. Weeds and grass had grown ferociously during the wet spell, and on Thursday I completely remodelled a flower bed at the front of the house, digging out old plants, grass and weeds and planting some new astrantia, aquilegia, and some I don't know what they are at all, donated by our kind neighbour who just happens to be a demon gardener - I do love a chaotic flower bed full of surprises. It kept me busy working and musing on those weird things which come out of the ground, seed heads blowing around, curly tendrils, bulbs, branching things and the fascination of the sweet pea pods drying into twisty shapes, their seeds showing more prominently through their cases; and when I came back indoors, my pen moved to depict them.

One day the sun shone down through the chestnuts, illuminating their spreading leaves like giants' hands, bringing to mind this most beautiful poem.

When I am Among the Trees 
by Mary Oliver
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When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.
Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.
And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”

Carrot top update - it did flower! No longer attached to the plant in its pot, I cut the triffidy bit off because it was draining too much energy from the rest of the plant, but it has flourished just in water. The rest of the plant is looking very pretty, with delicate frondy leaves and doing well now it has more energy.

The process of its growth reminded me of some forgotten work I made years ago. I took prints from some umbels by inking them up with a print roller, then transferred the image onto paper by placing the sheet over the inky plants and rolling the back of the sheet with a large wooden roller. Then I began to draw into the prints - the tentative marks show the very earliest beginnings of mark-making techniques I use today.
I can just about make out the year 2008 beside my signature in the lower right corner. I showed this one in Perthshire Open Studios that year and a friend bought it. I then forgot all about it until 2014 when a I visited the friend's house and spotted it hanging in a frame in the lounge. I have no other record of this work than the above photo I took that day - difficult to capture though the glass in its frame on the wall, but I'm glad I have it. It took me ages to locate and dig it out of my photo album. The friend moved to France and then disappeared (I fear the worst) and I will most likely never see this work again.

It was worth taking the time to find the image, not only am I glad to see it again but I mentioned in my last post that I fancied doing something different with my new work moving on, and this is it. My collection of weird stuff on my work room table keeps growing, and it's got to move on to make space, so I will try making some prints from them to draw on with all my current mark-making. I am excited about the prospect.

Just two weeks on and my avocado stone sprout is going crazy. The first one to sprout is pictured below, but the latest, No.3, is really scaring me - its root is all twisty, and when I move the jar it lashes around like a worm, and it has produced something snaky and hairy in its water. Nature is terrifying, I'm the rabbit caught in the headlights - I don't want to look, but I can't stop looking.

These are my very first successes after many years of trying to get an avocado stone to sprout! (Apologies for hairy finger, looks like everything is sprouting right now)

I just can't believe how this detail from Before There Were Saturdays relates to the current avocado stones sprouts, given I have never had any success with growing them before.
By the way, I am thinking about doing something different with new work moving forward. I still haven't found what it is, but it will happen.

Shortly after drawing last week's sprouting carrot tops, I drew a the core of a bell pepper. Its flesh had been cut away for a salad leaving the arched pyramid form with its bustle of seeds inside, rather like a deconstructed buttressed church sheltering a congregation. Or a big ghastly alien throat, if you prefer. It hung around in my work room and began involving itself in a most interesting process - I wouldn't say it was decomposing, because nothing went mouldy (wrong PH for mould, perhaps, a bit like sourdough culture?) - the fleshy parts just began to disappear leaving the seedball intact, I suppose by dehydration. I drew it again collapsing upon itself, pictured below.

I didn't throw it away after drawing it, I seldom do throw away these things, hence my collection of gross objects which will freak anybody out when I die and they come to empty my room. But look what it has become now. The photos below show what's left; it's the size of a conker now, and the small remaining part of the base of the pepper (right pic) has become a pretty flower. From a big, proud, glossy green fruit my bell pepper has gone to this - fascinating, as Spock would say. It actually feels nice to handle.
Oh well, I suppose it happens to us all in time!  I will get around to drawing its remains soon which will clarify what I see, something photos cannot do. And I may even experiment with growing the seeds.

Last Wednesday I completed the first drawing for 'The Architect's Garden' series. I hit upon the title In No Way Pure by accident; I overheard the words "no way pure" listening to something while I was working on the very last segment of the drawing. I just knew it was the perfect title, with a nod to Le Corbusier and Purist architecture, at the same time as referencing the promiscuous spawning activity of the organisms in the drawing. I hastily scribbled a note at the time, but omitted to note the source.

The phrase may have come from Delia Derbyshire: The Myths and the Legendary Tapes (Arena) on BBC iPlayer, but I'll have to watch that again to find out if that is so. I have no problems with watching it again as I have a Delia Derbyshire obsession. It could also possibly have come from Sisters With Transistors produced by Anna Lena Films. B and I purchased a ticket to watch the film on virtual cinema, but I feel that was too long ago (12 May) for the stage the drawing had reached by the time I heard the phrase. That's an amazing film, by the way, documenting the seriously cool women who pioneered electronic digital music. Even if you're not a fan of the musical genre, the trailer alone is worth a watch. I made screeds of notes in the dark while watching it which are pretty much illegible, but no mention of "no way pure" amongst them. If you are reading this off in the future (ooh, time travel - play that Dr Who theme again!) the links will most likely have expired, apologies for that.

Anyhow, I digress; as soon as I finished the drawing I began trying out some papers from the sample pack of Awagami Factory papers I received on 17 April. I have been itching to try them out, but wouldn't allow myself the pleasure until I finished the drawing, I just kept gloating over them until now. I used my main mark-making techniques on both sides of the sheets, pictured below are my two favourites. The labelled sides are the 'reverse' side with the 'right side' beneath; on the left is Kozo Natural Select 46gsm which is a lovely soft natural white, and on the right is Kitakata SH-16 36gsm, which has a most pleasant buff colour.

Just one small section to go now! I'm not even going to think about messing it up at this stage.
I'm not going to complain about free websites but Weebly logged me out while writing this post and everything I had written was lost, not even saved as a draft, and I don't have time to rewrite. Crapola. Lesson to self: write content in a different app, then copy and paste. Grr.

It was a slow week as far as work went. The weather turned horribly cold - and it was my birthday yesterday! That turned out to be a very busy day, and for a couple of days before that I did a lot of housework, laundry and ironing (bed sheets, not the drawing this time, although it does need it). I also began the week pattern-making a new design, see my Binky McKee blog for that if you fancy a look.

Apologies for the awful lighting, that's a Scottish spring evening for you, for the weather took a turn for the better today meaning it's warmer, thank goodness, but big black clouds on one side of the sky and brilliant sunshine on the other. Really hard to get even lighting under the circumstances.
I got in a good few hours' drawing today so here is the top section of the work gradually creeping across. I'll post a progress pic of the whole sheet when the light improves enough to get a good photo, at the moment when I try the top half looks creamy and the bottom half is burnt out with bright light.

It feels as though the drawing is coming along in steps, which brings me to - the film The Thirty-Nine Steps. I have seen both versions half a dozen times each, but I have never read the book by John Buchan. However, I've been listening to an excellent reading of it on BBC Sounds in the audiobook section while working on this, what a ripping yarn! - but I would swear half of it isn't even in the films, in fact I don't know where the story line for the film came from. So far I haven't found any mention of wet stockings, sex interest, or the bridge in Killin (close to where I used to live) at all, yet the tale has us already returned from Scotland to London.

I continued with a bit of sketchbook work at the beginning of the week, following on from the experimental drawing I posted last weekend, trying a few different approaches to the brick drawings. You'll see the book is increasingly held together with tape because it's much easier to remove the page to work this kind of drawing; I need to keep turning the paper around without the book getting in the way and I get a better wrist position with the paper flat on the drawing board.

It suggested the mosaic approach was good for this drawing, above is a small section I worked after the sketchbook drawings. I'm still very interested in a 3D approach for another drawing, perhaps with triffids growing out from it. Below shows the progress across the whole sheet to date, it's feeling very exciting.

I began adding brick structures to the drawing this week, using my Dad's old curve templates to reinforce the The Architect's Garden theme. I began by making mosaics of the brick and tile shapes which fit inside the curve shapes behind the floating organisms.

I began one quick experiment in my sketchbook, playing with making a solid brick structure from the curves. The first one here is a bit dodgy, and the yellowish smudge on the left is a bit of dinner - gross, I know, and professional to the end! (That would never happen to one of the actual drawings). I'm a bit out of practice since the 'Empty Spaces' brick drawings of early 2014, I haven't made any brick drawings since; but The Architect's Garden work has renewed a purpose for them combined with all the templates diary work I did last year, so it's perhaps time to brush up on my technique.
​
I haven't yet decided how illusionistic I want the bricks to be for the current work, only that I don't want it to be 'clever' as in Escher's wonderful works; so there will be a bit more sketchbook work (sans dinner, hopefully) until I make up my mind. The decorative, flat mosaic style may be more appropriate for the drawing I'm working at the moment, but I may do something different in the next one. 

Below: Empty Spaces 3 2014, and a detail of the drawing. I did a lot of bricks back then! I forget the exact dimensions now (the original is stored in the loft) but it's somewhere in the region of 60x80cm. The materials are still pretty much the same as I use today; mapping pens and rotring technical pen on Japanese tissue.

A new drawing underway this week, progress shots above. I am using replacement tissue paper for the old Kozu Shi I used in the past for my large drawings. No longer in production, I used my very last piece of it a few weeks ago, and had already experimented and tried a few others before settling on this one. I'm currently drawing this new work on a half sheet of Imitation Japanese (approx. 50x38cm) which is very nice, but takes the ink in a slightly different way from the old Kozu Shi; wherever the pen pauses, a small blot forms especially if the pen is new and full. It's nice and characterful and I definitely enjoy using it for simple linear work and monotypes, but ideally I would like to find a closer match for Kozu Shi for the kind of work pictured above.

Then somebody asked me on Instagram if I was using gampi. For all my obsession with Japanese papers, amazingly I hadn't heard of gampi before - research required! I ended up on a fascinating journey and learned so much on the way, understanding so much more about why my papers behave the way they do, and decided to give some gampi papers a go.
My first port of call is always Jackson's in London, who have a wonderful selection of different papers, and where I always bought my Kozu Shi (in fact, they were marvellous when I discovered production had ceased and rang them up and hunted out every last sheet they had left for me, which lasted several years as I 'saved it for best'). It was time to place a new order with Jackson's for some more Fabriano Rosaspina which I use for Binky paintings anyway, so I looked for gampi and found they do lots! I bought a sample pack of Awagami papers which arrived yesterday, the papers are so gorgeous I was drooling over them all, the presentation of the pack is simply beautiful with lots of information about each paper and I definitely found two or three which I will try. 

I have been pinching some of the textures I use for my Binky illustration on my iPad to mock up a few ideas for the Architect's Garden work. I drew a sheet of brickwork and trellis marks in Procreate 'by hand' (using a stylus like a pencil, Procreate being primarily designed for drawing) which look great over the rough stony texture of a scan of a monotype drawing. I collected scans of the templates work I was making last summer and a few other bits and pieces which can be used in digital collages.
Working digitally is a quick and convenient way to see if I have anything going on, but I can't wait for the weather to warm up so I can get back into my studio. It's too cold to work in there at the moment - north facing, great for the light about nine months of the year, but dark and perishing in the winter.