Sitting Duck doodle. While the skies were grey and the marina was sprinkled with circles Diane and I sat in the cafe catching up on the new year. It was noisy and the humidity uncomfortable, but we were undisturbed apart from removal of our used dishes. At home I tried to draw the condensation on my drink can and the serviette rose Diane made to cover the soup splash on my t shirt. I am finding it hard to get back into regular sketching habits !

Twenty four pages as yet unbound, 3 inches by 4 inches, 6 pages per line, 4 lines merged together. I intend them to make a book that will fit in my wooden crate. I have bound them several times, no effort has turned out exactly how I had hoped for. They are a series of influences from my past, indelible in my make up and they are as fresh as the day they happened, sight, smell and sounds accompany them. A map of sorts.

These road photos are not interesting enough by themselves so I shall try posting them in blocks, starting after this one, which actually was a bad photo to begin with. I shall continue with the exercise series of more than 500 photos as I originally intended. Vivien Blackburn writes about a timely topic for me, what are the key elements of drawing and painting better, see her blog here January 6th 2012  Hopefully I will find what I am looking for.

This is looking strangely like something it's not. What I am enjoying with these snapshot sketches  is starting each day with a new one even if yesterday's is unfinished.

Drawn with a black Cretacolor pencil (which I found was hard to get different shades with). I wish to be accurate and not losing that but getting some sort of movement and life. Should I leave out or put in objects because the photo was a snap? I am evaluating this out loud, why I am doing this - it is to help me interpret what I see. Maybe simplify too and that gives me the go ahead to omit.

No 2: Sketching from a photo taken in the car whilst traveling at 100K down to Hawkes bay.

I want to try and change how I draw things, starting with a series of sketches from my road photos taken on the way to Hawkes Bay. This is number one and it's amazing how it's as bad as the previous post. I shall continue - maybe it will take many sketches to work out where I want to go.

This is not what I want to do, so I have a starting point. Perhaps it will be more difficult to change how I do things than I think. 

I have made a really rough crate out of a recycled grape box from Chile.  I have featured the printed wood on the inside because of a box my father made. It was WWII in Scotland and 'waste not want not' was a useful adage. He made a box for my mother's letters out of a Scotch Whiskey box, the labels still cover the wood on the inside. Today I keep used postage stamps in his box. In my new box I am going to make some small books that fit like sardines and might include some other items of interest. Each binding should be different and maybe more experimental.

On a wet, windy day Diane and I visited the Satellite Gallery in Ponsonby and afterwards took the opportunity to try urban sketching in the car. (Left) Franklin Road known for it's Christmas lights, and (right) part of the Unitarian meeting house at the top of Ponsonby Road. This was followed by a brief visit for supplies at Studio Art Supplies and an excellent lunch at Oh!So - just what we needed.

EDM # 90 Draw something with wings. Using my brayer and new printing inks with nothing in mind, the first roll sparks my imagination and I have a field or two, then the sky - looking suspiciously like geysers just over the hill - some tree shapes on the left ahh, pause, where to put the birds. Do I have a flock flying through the geysers, far off up to middle distance? Deciding just to do one on the ground, I cut a stencil and rolled it.  Hmm... now I think it should have been the flock and that would have solved the geysers. The ink is taking a long, long time to dry, I intended fixing the clouds with more ink, or even pencils - but it is still damp. On the reverse pages the oil has soaked through, so experiment needs more developing. Using the brayer across the gutter also caused a few problems, ink going where it shouldn't, build up on edges, marks on the brayer transferring. I did try to mask vulnerable areas.

EDM # 89 Draw a button or buttons. I had to look out my button boxes and they were perched in the cupboard, right up near the ceiling, piled high on the top of many other boxes. The box of blue ones bounced down and I caught it, I must find some in here surely. These are actual buttons and harder to draw than I thought, I did them before breakfast and had the hunger pang shakes.

EDM # 88 Draw something breezy - something that blows in the wind - a flag etc. I chose a piece of crumpled up paper, inked up and printed turning each one a little, then coloured in with pencils

Small Journal entry no 71 Create an image using dots. Once again Asher proves to be reliable for a short time study.

Small Journal entries no. 69 and 70. Do nothing was 69 and this is as near as I could do to recording nothing. 70 is to write a list of things you could do, and do the last thing you list.

Small Journal entry 67 and 68. The first task is to draw an outline of an object without looking at the page (contour drawing). This is Asher, our new naughty boy kitten. The next is to write down what you are thinking about right now.

Small Journey entries 65 and 66. The first is to write about something secret, cut it up into several pieces and glue them back in. It troubled me finding a secret - I don't have any! What's new my family would say. The second 66 is to write down definitions or descriptions of words you are interested in.

Small Journal entry no. 64. Out of town day trip enabled me to look for the brief ' find several colour combinations in public, that you respond to. Document them using swatches.' The ominous sky next to the bright yellow petrol station was one. I found a paint shop and selected some colour charts, took them outside to match the clouds in the sky. The yellow blue photo concertinas out. The weather closed in over the top of us and it rained. We visited the almost new Morrinsville Gallery, then to Hamilton's Artspost and Museum, Chris caught up with us here. Saw Steph and Em and then Ann met up with us for a long long lunch. Ailie, Diane and I headed back home.

Small Journal entry no 63. The instructions were to physically alter a page (cut a hole, stain it, burn it, fold it etc) I took five pages to play with this. I wet the page and tore holes, then water coloured the shapes on one side and on the other added paper weaving and tech pen detail. On following page I cut a rectangle, melted wax round the edge, held a flame to further melt the wax and char the edges and tore off a third of the page. Final page I stuck on the rectangle from the cut out added further collage  and wrote over the narrowed page and the final one. I haven't posted this journal often because it's purpose is fun, experimental and a warm up, things often change or do not get finished.

A pleasant few hours were spent with Elizabeth last Thursday. I thought I should try and remember the room. This time I would work over the gutter, OK, but found afterwards that the handwriting was hard to read over the ditch. This is the room we spent most of the time in, heads down looking at books and talking. The view was overlooked almost, just a glance every wee while and an exclamation of wow! This is not how Elizabeth's room was - just my memory of it. Proportions, scale are my misery! 

EDM # 86 Draw a traffic sign.  We stood beside this road sign up Mt. Ruapehu way back in 1967, that's over 40 years ago! We were chaperoned on this weekend away because we had only just got engaged. How things have changed.

EDM # 85 Draw a store front in your neighbourhood - inside, outside or both. The more I tried to make this right the more wrong it went. The mistake was in the initial pencil sketch and I leave it here - impossible to fix.

EDM # 84 Draw some bread and write about it. The bread crust has always been a special treat in our family. The walk back from the shop as a child, small holes picked into the end where it was thought no one would notice, fresh bread made me a criminal. Then for years when I made my own bread - the first slice was for the cutter. If it was just a family lunch the tops of the bread were cut off so we shared all available crusts. Nothing to do with being a martyr but reverse psychology may have been used somewhere in my family history.

EDM # 83.

The task this time is to draw a body of water, ocean, lake, pond or river. I started with no padding under my journal page and ended up with the lines from my cutting mat showing through. I am OK with that, it just adds another uncontrolled element.

EDM no 82 Draw your art space, drawing board, desk, studio. That's the challenge. My studio is 1.5 metres by 3 metres - it's tiny, and packed to the hilt with stuff, shelves upon shelves, ledges with blu tack to hold stuff on top of other stuff, hanging stuff, boxes, trays and equipment. My chair has wheels so I can reach most things without getting up, it's the area underneath the desk that has seldom used stuff, I crawl and wallow to retrieve. Me, on my chair, at my desk - my art space.

Solar printing reinforced and revisited this week. Slowly I am collecting the necessary equipment, stochastic screen, some new inks, making a graph guide and getting it laminated, now I wait for the sun - warnings and a really beefy weather system crossing over the country this weekend, patience needed. I have moved my press indoors at last before the cold weather gets our winter going properly. These experiments are with Graphite Chemical Ink and done at Susan's.

This may not appear to have moved on from the last photo, but it has. The books have content and it takes time because they are larger. The two opened on the top contain copies of sepia photographs of family and friends, the smaller one has a selection of my hand carved stamps. The ones used as hinges have copies of old family letters which can identify the writer - a guessing book for family.The scroll is a calligraphic sampler. There is more to this level than meets the eye.

Solar Printing Workshop. I haven't done this process before. Using a softish water soluble surface over metal, and a process of selected exposure and washing, I ended up with the print above. My first solar print. I have lots to learn, even what is considered a desired print effect.

I am always surprised by printing, part of it's charm, and the lines, I know I like lines, so I am trying to fit in more printmaking before it is covered by the mundane.

This series of photos has nearly caught up to where we are at the moment. These are a more muted restrained set of boxes and books than the earlier ones.

We have been going for a while on this project now, still looking at Randi Parkhurst's video but having to compromise with structures and proportions, finding individual solutions. The previous post's books and boxes are on the left hand side of this shot, in a box. Once again there is a hinged book, a concertina swing book and a tiny pamphlet book. Some of these books still need content, but we forge ahead with the structures.