I don't want to see what happens next...

I wasn't going to post this. It's sketchy, it's unrefined, it's vulnerable. This is how drawing feels. Like removing tiny but important parts of myself and flinging them into choppy waters. So it's more of a description in sketch form, explaining what happens on the inside in the only way I know how. It took a lot for me to start sharing this stuff, I used to leave the room when people looked at my drawings. Now I can't hold it all in! 

Under skin is where I hide...

Hmmm...how do I go about explaining this? Not the kind of thing I usually go in for is it? I was asked for the Eye of Providence done as some kind of creatures eye looking like it's peering out from under the skin - this is going to be adapted into a tattoo at some undefined point in the future. I suppose some people have art put under their skin and some people have the opposite happen.

This drawing started life as an octopus eye and then changed to a dragon (of sorts) after battling with tentacles and losing miserably. I don't think this animal would have talons like that though and they aren't really big enough to belong to it either so I'm going to assume that some other unfortunate thing has got itself trapped under there with it. So the all seeing eye is blue, has scales and captures unsuspecting smaller reptiles to keep under human skin. Someone better let the Masons know...

I want you to notice when I'm not around...

It feels like such a long time since I've been here. A week is a long time in politics...I kind of lost all creative ability for a few days which was an almost physically painful experience. I'm starting to pull myself back together with some more acrylic ink experimentation, like a reverse Rorschach test: the ink tells me what it wants to look like by virtue of random colour mixing. I don't tend to have favourites amongst things that aren't immediately finite but if I had a ray gun to my head and had to choose a colour I'd possibly go for the blue-grey of Nuthatch wings. It's uplifting and melancholic at the same time. I like it best when it fills the sky and tells you "this day could go either way." 

A slice of life...

Sometimes it's just too hard to maintain the level of intensity required for fine detail, sometimes the ink needs to run, sometimes the art needs to make itself and let me know when it's done. But even then I can't just let things be. 

This was an experiment in acrylic ink. Shall I explain how I did it? Sigh...oh, alright then. The paper was wet and the ink diluted and dotted on with a brush from the centre. It was quite mesmerising to watch such unexpectedly concentric circles forming and it was nice to get lost in the swirl, the bleeding of each layer into the next. Some additions with a very fine brush and a slightly more saturated ink solution created the odd darker line here and there. But what exactly was it? Newton's rings? Ripples on water? Magnetic field lines? I knew I'd have to work into it somewhere with the biro, I couldn't leave it alone so it became a sliced tree showing it's growth rings with ballpoint bark on the outside. I've tried not to overdo it and just keep the pen to the edges, the ink effect is very subtle in places but that's ok. Maybe you see something different...

Like scattered black and whites...

A tiding of magpies. This is from quite a while ago but since it's leaving me to find a new home, I thought I'd share it. 

Just a little doodle really from a time when illustrating sayings from folklore was in my head along with drawing flocks of birds. I liked the idea of showing each individual differently despite them being part of a larger group. A sort of metaphor for humans which I'd love to claim was deliberate but has, in fact, just dawned on me as I write this. 

I'm not overly keen on the text, it seemed like a good idea at the time but I think it takes away the effect of perspective. Like many of my "projects" it was subconsciously abandoned after a couple of drawings (actually, I can't bring to mind any others so it could be just this one). I'm scattered, I have a new idea forming before the one I'm working on even gets onto paper. "If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?" Thanks Einstein, it obviously happens to the best of us.

The tranquility of solitude...

Another weird little creature that wouldn't leave me alone. It was just a matter of where to put her..so she ended up in an egg. I drew this really as a way of starting a new sketchbook. Most people who draw or write get intimidated from time to time by the dreaded blank page, especially the first page of a new sketchbook. I'm not usually big on sketchbooks, I give up as soon as a drawing isn't "perfect" and it becomes another place to jot down recipes and shopping lists, but this one has the purest, smooth, white paper (that's kind of a holy grail for me) so I dived in with this doodle. 

I thought about giving her furniture, a cup of tea perhaps, maybe a picture on her shell wall but as with this drawing, I quite like the emptiness. A cross section, slicing into someone's tranquil hideaway. As for what she's reading...who knows? Perhaps she's revisiting one of her old sketchbooks.