Open Eye Gallery's annual 'On a Small Scale' exhibition is on the horizon, so it's time to get on my A5 mojo.
Some time ago I found an old pad of blank manuscript paper in the house amongst a heap of music books. I found the pale blue-grey, thin, mechanical lines of the staffs on creamy paper exciting, full of the possibilities of unheard melodies played on strange instruments. I decided to keep it for drawing.
I began a test piece over the weekend, thinking I could perhaps make something for the exhibition, but things didn't go quite as I had imagined.

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.

Above is a detail of the small preparatory drawing I made in 2015 for Before There Were Saturdays. I have it hanging in a frame in my workroom and recently the more I look at the top section pictured here, the more I want to apply this way of drawing to the Architect's Garden ideas. I'm not sure why, but I'm thinking a lot again about the zoological engravings of Ernst Haeckel; perhaps because of their symmetry and structure, which suggest a certain kind of architecture.

As well as the architectural interest I am curious to start using the whippy, scribbly shapes pictured above on the left, which were experiments in a sketchbook of 2015.
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I think there is another reason for the urge to get onto work like this again: I have been very busy starting a new set of very painterly small floral Binky McKee work with monsters and funny dogs (on those papers I was preparing the other day) which I am loving to bits, but as a balance to all the joy and figuration libre my patient side feels inclined to start something altogether slower and more rational - that's the beauty of being two artists instead of just one, you get to do the best of everything. It's restful and refreshing to change things about, and seems to benefit both disciplines.

Preparing papers for painting this week it was lovely to work with real, smelly materials again. A mixture of monotype, tonking, scumbling and colour washes filled my work space with the wonderful aromas of printing ink, white spirit, and damp paper - music to my nose, if you'll excuse the mixed metaphor, infinitely preferable to so-called room fresheners. I am adding extra texture to my primer in the form of whiting, much as I used to at art school when I bagged marble dust from the sculpture department for the purpose. I am told whiting is the same kind of thing as marble dust, but it's not quite as grainy; not such a bad thing, perhaps, as my student paintings often resembled sandpaper. I was a bit worried about potential adhesion issues, but I needn't have been because afterwards when cleaning down my monotype plate (a big slab of toughened glass) I discovered lumps of the whiting addition primer so thoroughly adhered to the glass I struggled to remove it with a scraper. The primer itself is acrylic gesso with high flexibility so there shouldn't be any issues with the heavy, card-like Fabriano Rosaspina I use.

I am making plans for what I'll be doing with the small scale works now the monotype ink has dried thoroughly. At the moment they are being pressed flat, so I will be starting work on them this week, aiming to have four ready to ship to the Open Eye Gallery in Edinburgh by the end of the week. This one pictured above returned to an old favourite shape I have used a few times in the past, which comes from an old wooden Indian salt box. I drew around it onto a piece of card to use as a template alongside my Dad's old ones.

I got nothing done yesterday because I was making face-masks in colours for autumn and winter wear - I say masks, but in fact it took nearly 5 hours just to produce one. I had only intended spending a couple of hours on it, but I was working from a tutorial which I loved, but which I simply could not get to work. The new masks differ from the ones I made earlier in the year in that they have vertical pleats instead of the horizontal ones more commonly in use, designed to be more comfortable because the mask doesn’t touch the nose and mouth; however, I just couldn’t figure out the measurements. I spent a while cutting out a template as per instructions and everything, but it still wouldn’t work. There wasn’t enough room to make pleats by the time it was stitched up, and I noticed at this stage it was already mask-sized before any pleats went in. I’m wondering if the measurements given were for the finished product and not the cutting size?​ In addition, my sewing machine simply would not sew over the elastic straps so I spent ages faffing around before realising it would be so much easier not to try with the machine, but to leave holes to poke them in and hand stitch at the end.

Eventually I did it with gathers around the nose and under the chin instead of pleats, and it was a success in the end so at least I got something out of the day. It was much more breathable and comfortable than the others, too. It was fine for me, but much too small for B! I’ll be back on mask-making this afternoon, this time I’m going to work backwards with the measurements to get the dimensions for cutting out the fabric. Look at all the scribbling and scoring out all over my mask template! It's not my tidiest work.

Not much to report this week, mostly because of a work crisis over at Binky McKee, but here is a little progress on the drawings, four of which I will submit to the Open Eye Gallery's On a Small Scale Christmas exhibition. I work on semi-transparent tissue paper, which means I can take advantage of reduced opacity and work on the back as well as the front. Here I have gessoed the images in the centre of the monotype frames on the back. It's enough to make those areas stand out, and it means I can draw easily over the area without clogging up my pens.

I do love my close-ups of the work! Here are three laden with texture and inky splotchy marks (so inspiring), the white gesso can be seen underneath the drawings.

Here’s the latest drawing Steam Machine finished except for ironing, and that may have to wait a while because I procrastinate all ironing terribly, including artworks. I have eight in total lined up so far in this series, each measuring 285x225mm, but I will be taking a break from it now - to get on with works for the Open Eye Gallery Christmas exhibition! 

Called ‘On a Small Scale’, each year in November one of the Open Eye’s beautiful big galleries (it is an elegant Georgian building in Edinburgh’s New Town) is banked on all four walls with A5-size works, tiled tightly together, and it always looks amazing - a colourful mosaic of all the artists works which beckons the viewer in for close inspection. This year, for the first time in its history the exhibition will be launched online. This is to allow social distancing in the gallery where selected works will be on show, but I do find it exciting to think an online presence will give the exhibition a global reach.​

Artists are invited to submit up to four works measuring 148x300mm, but I have already prepared a series of 12 from which I will select four for submission to ‘On a Small Scale’. I generally work in series so it suits me to work this way, leaving me with eight for other exhibitions.

New drawing in progress with a comet, of course, and more unreadable writing. The section at the bottom right (pictured above) looked to me like a strange machine, so I gave it cloud puffs rising up towards the comet. I drew the comet around a splodge of dark red monotype ink which I thought gave it a sultry  Martian look.