New Year
Wild Geese – Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
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I’m not a fan of New Year at the best of times and I think it was fairly inevitable that I would find this one hard. The prospect of a Christmas without Kai or a significant other had left me feeling empty and vulnerable and prone to rushing into, and out of, things I probably should have been sensible enough to leave alone until I was in a slightly more together place. And so yesterday saw me a little puddly mess for most of the day, my pillows becoming a pathetically self-pitying Roshach test-like splodge of mascara on white linen, cross with myself and feeling hopeless and lost, vowing that the best thing all round would be to shut myself off from life where I couldn’t fall over any more or hurt anyone.
Until, that is, I thought, sod this. I’m not seeing in 2012, my brand new year, sniffing into my duvet feeling sorry for myself.
Read MoreChristmas Wishes
This Christmas I’m supporting Centrepoint, the UK’s leading charity for homeless young people and it would really make my Christmas if you’d consider doing the same. Homelessness in the UK jumped this year by 15 per cent from last year, and more than a third of this increase was made up of young people between the ages of 16 and 24. Using their More than a Gift service you could give a ‘gift’ on behalf of a friend or loved one to help a young person that’ll be spending this Christmas on the streets. From as little as a fiver, you could help provide a cooked meal, a book, or a warm bed for the night. Pretty much every single one of us could go without five quid’s worth of something to give someone who’s not facing much of a happy Christmas a better chance. Please think about it. If you’ve enjoyed my posts and tweets this year, you could even send the virtual gift on my behalf – my email is josie@sleepisfortheweak.org.uk if you’d like to.
Many, many thanks, and merry Christmas.
love Josie x
Read MoreAssignment Two – natural forms still life
To finish this unit I had one more still life to do as an assessed piece, trying to draw together what I’d been learning.
As soft pastels and chalks had been my favourite coloured medium so I decided to go with them for my final piece. I liked the soft, impressionist style they created, allowing a combination of areas of blended colours and hatching lines.
Read MoreDrawing Animals
This was a tough set of exercises as I have no pets and no access to any really! If there’s a better reason for us getting a kitten I don’t know one, but I didn’t really get organised with that particular plan in time. So I had to improvise a bit and its meant I’ve not really done as much on this section of the course as I’d like – I’m spending time over Christmas with family with pets though so I’m hoping to add to this section of work over the next couple of weeks with some impromptu life sketches of sleeping cats and maybe some garden birds if I can get chance to sit outside for a while. I find it hard to work very quickly, being a bit fastidious with my drawing, so this will be a bit of a challenge for me I think. I’m a bit limited without a car as to where I can get to in the short times I have to work during Kai’s nursery sessions. I could do with dedicating a longer day trip when I get chance to a wildlife sanctuary or somewhere like that. Would mean drawing in front of other people though – eeep! Since outside drawing forms pretty much the whole of the next module, I’m going to have to get used to it though!
Exercise: Grabbing the chance
The one subject I did get to draw was my friend Suze’s lovely Boxer puppy, Moose. I used charcoal and chalk on coloured, textured paper which has always been my favourite medium for portraits and suited his colouring. I’m pleased with the muscle definition in his folded leg and the suggestion of hair on his paws and neck. Getting the folds of his lovely face was tricky, especially as a lot of it was hidden in the pose but I think I got it about right. I really loved doing this one and would definitely like to do some more pet portraits. Might be a way of making some money, you never know!
Read MorePlants and Flowers
Exercise: Negative space in a plant
Here I used my peace lily to do a negative space study – drawing the spaces around and between the leaves and stalks to reveal the shape of the plant. I’d found previous negative space exercises really helpful and I do think it’s improving my drawing. When I sit to sketch something now I instinctively look at the spaces first rather than the object itself. It’s a quite a non-daunting way to start looking at something complicated too – so easy to become a bit panicked by the detailed overlay of patterns and shapes. When I’m feeling really daunted by a piece now I will sometimes now do the negative space as a first sitting – drawing the spaces and shapes and then stopping and having a break or even coming back to it the next day. Somehow sitting down to a piece where the shapes are all laid out ready feels a lot more reassuring and I don’t panic so much as I begin to work in the tones and details.
It’s best to work slowly when working with negative space and I try to keep my eyes on the subject more than I do on the paper. You have to constantly stop and reassess the shapes your making and their proportion to one another. Screwing up your eyes a bit helps you to focus just on the main lines too. In the picture below I worked big on A3 and used graphite pencil, added some extra lines in the white space to define the odd leaf and stalk, just so you can see what it is, and then filled in the negative space with dark hatching to make the shapes stand out. I’m pleased with its accuracy and the fact that it fills the whole paper. I need to be braver and not worry about the edges of things getting ‘chopped’ off – it makes for more interesting pictures sometimes and makes the areas of negative space more complete, closed shapes and easier to relate to one another.
Read MoreFruit and Veg Studies
I was going to have to really get to grips with colour for this bit as the next series of exercises consisted of drawing fruit and veg entirely using coloured marks. I had a play around with media to start with, seeing what I could do with each one. Once again I hated coloured pencil (grapefruit, below) although I think I did a better job here in than in previous efforts. I really loved using coloured pastels though – I loved how you could blend to create smooth tones and graduate the colours (apple, below) but also make looser hatching marks (pear, below) but still suggest finer detail on stalks etc depending on whether you made bold, flat marks, or finer lines using the edge of the pastel. Working with pastels it was easy to introduce a touch of colour into the shadows, too, as plain black and grey often looked too flat. I’d enjoyed working with marker pens in the last module and again it was fun here (plum, below). You can be so bold and expressive, working quickly, though I found it was best to start with the lighter colours, rather than darker, and build it backwards because it was hard to overlay lighter colours on top of dark once they were down.
