Excitement!

Running on the Beach

This one’s taken from another photo in Swedish Outdoor Life.

I’ve been neglecting this blog I know – the last couple of weeks have been, not exactly busy (I have ME: life is never busy exactly!), but by my rather low standards, full. I’m adjusting to pacing myself so I avoid crashing out completely, I’ve had a medical assessment that I found rather stressful and I’m doing an online course, which is fabulous (more about this another day) but takes up a lot of time.

And then there is the Exciting Thing.

The Exciting Thing? The Thing that is so Exciting it warrants capital letters? Yes that Thing. And what is it? I’m going to be featured in Carla Sonheim’s fabulous new book, Drawing Lab!. Oh yes I am! Now how great is that?!

So much so that I had to spend some time simply being excited. I know. But really, I am only 6 years old you know, I just have a large vocabulary so you think I’m 43.

Drawing Lab is aimed at mixed media artists who would like to include drawing in their work, and it’s going to be full of interesting, varied and most of all fun drawing assignments. I am so honoured that Carla asked me to be a part of this. It will be out in 2010, which is not too far away now….

A little something I did earlier

Red Dragon Pie

A4 sized

Bliss Balls

A4 sized

Recipe for a Food Coop

A3 sized

I did these illustrations a while ago – they are for my local food coop – they are going to be screenprinted onto aprons, bags and tea-towels and I can’t wait to see them finished!

Persephone according to SuziBlu

Give yourself a treat – SuziBlu’s hilarious but salutary re-telling of the story of Persephone. Must see viewing for all girls (no matter how old) everywhere. You will see hats at first, then Suzi gives a little intro. It does take a while to load as the whole film is about 30 mins long, but it’s worth it!

Woman Plans, God Laughs

So in my last post I said I was building a webiste…well it ain’t going well! I thought (oh my arrogance!) that as I was familiar with WordPress (I’ve used it for three years in the free version) using it with a host, as my content manager, would be reasonably straightforward. It. Is. Not. It just all seems to be very technically demanding and I have few techy skills. Added to this, WordPress has been updated and there are one or two glitches…and, frankly since it’s been three weeks and I haven’t even got the thing off the ground yet – I haven’t posted or uploaded any content – I’m putting it on hold. So scrap that last post, for now drawing diary stays right here!

And so here are a few more sketches:

Hungry Man I

Continuous line, without looking at the paper

Hungry Man II

Continuous line, without looking at the paper

Hungry Man Satisfied

Direct response drawing

I hope you are all having less technologically frustrating times

Life drawing and two announcements

The announcements first I think Dave and I are now engaged to be married! Actually he asked me two weeks ago but I now have my ring back from the jewellers (it was resized) so it feels more real. We are so happy. And happy with the ring too – it’s an antique, Victorian, which means we avoided the blood diamonds issue and it came from a charity so the money we spent went to a hospice. Good all round, I say.

And the second announcement is that I am setting up a website – I’m using wordpress as my content manager so the front page will be a blog and drawing diary will be moving over to the new site. It will be renamed though. I’ll leave this blog up however, as I wont be transferring all the content. This means that updates here will be a little sporadic until the new site is live.

Waiting

I was in town with Dave on Wednesday – or rather, he was in town, I sat in a cafe for most of the time – after we’d done the errands which needed both of us anyway. I didn’t do much sketching being way too hot and way too tired (we’re having a heatwave here and us poor Brits are just not used to it). I did try doing a continuous line drawing with my brush pen though:

i founf this more difficult with a brush – the fibres are so flexible it’s almost impossible to tell whether the brush is hitting the paper or not unless you are looking. Consequently the direct response drawing I tried was a complete failure – most of it wasn’t even there! I had just drawn it in the air.

Anyway, I did another but with my fountain pen:

And rounded off with a portrait of the first chap with the brushpen. I didn’t finish it though:

It looks set to be a hot weekend – I hope you all have a good one and happy Independence day to all you Americans out there!