Drawings
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Black Mountains – Lower Slopes
Trees present an interesting drawing challenge. There is (normally) just one trunk, then a few main branches, then many smaller branches and finally many, many leaves. However, if one sketches the same level of detail for each leaf as is given to the trunk then the drawing will never be finished! This particular tree is…
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Candle
Not sure there is much to say about this one really. It’s a candle. It’s alight. I have put a lot of graphite on the paper, but crucially I have managed to avoid putting it where it is not needed. End of story I guess …
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David’s Admirers
We all know that Florence is full of Renaissance art – and if we stop to think about it we also know that in consequence Florence is full of art-admiring tourists, their backpacks, their cameras and camera phones. So it seemed fitting to include, and indeed emphasise, these onlookers in a scene from the Galleria…
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Artists Mannequin
I realise that these things exist primarily to improve drawings of real people. They are supposed to guide an artist to help get the right body proportions and realistic limb positions of any people in a scene. However, when they are set up in an action position (such as this one in a running pose…
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Ostrich
To drawing something, it is of course necessary to figure out where everything should go on the paper – the relative sizes of the objects in the scene and how they all fit together. So it was that when I drew this ostrich I was quite surprised to discover just how small an ostrich head…
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Drawing Room
This scene of calm was the room where we rested after one of our days walking a section of Offa’s Dyke. There is a great contrast between the light and dark areas in this scene, which is always an interesting challenge to achieve with only a black pen. The walk was a challenge too of…
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Under Reigate Hill
Well obviously this isn’t really “under” the hill – this is the path that runs from the main Reigate Hill road to Wray Lane, and so the path effectively runs across the foot of the hill. However, to me the phrase “under the hill” sums this up rather well and I get to choose the…
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Goðafoss
Iceland has several magnificent waterfalls, many with equally impressive names. The name Goðafoss is often translated as “waterfall of the gods” and the view across it is certainly awe-inspiring. In the summer you might reasonably expect to see this fall illuminated by bright sunshine, but on our visit the sky was a leaden grey which…
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Raindrops
The way that raindrops play with light is fascinating and, if you can remember from physics how lenses work, not too difficult to understand. This picture is simply an attempt to get the rain-on-glass effect to look realistic. The rather blurry background to the scene is actually Iceland, a place that provides all sorts of…
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New Boots
An unexpected side-effect of the pandemic lockdown was that we started walking a lot. Well there wasn’t much else we were allowed to do outdoors and we are lucky enough to live only a few minutes from a range of hills covered in walking paths. Of course, if you start walking a lot there comes…
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A Perspective on Stowe
Stowe House sits in the middle of the equally magnificent Stowe Gardens, now run by the National Trust. The house itself contains a school about which regretably I know very little – which I’m sure is my loss rather than theirs! However, I do know that the gardens and buildings of Stowe offer many amazing…
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A Fresh Face
I always feel that drawing a face presents a type of double jeapody. Not only is there an expectation that the face will look real, there is often an equally strong requirement that the drawing actually looks like the person being drawn! This desire for a convincing likeness makes drawing well know personalities particularly challenging,…
