Drawing Tuesday - "From an old sketchbook"

Museum expeditions on Drawing Tuesdays have filled seven A4 sketchbooks so far, plus an A5 book that I used in June 2015 in Berlin. My favourite "Tuesday place" was the ethnological museum, and I got quite bold about putting just one item on the page. These two, from Mayan or Aztec civilisations, intrigued me at the time and continue to do so, so some of my drawing time was spent looking online to find more information ... and I got a bit sidetracked. 

Stone model of temple, 300-100 BC; clay "host figure", 350-650 AD

What I found combined the architecture of the temple with the interior space of the clay figure: house urns, and face urns, from various neolithic European cultures.

The pages got filled according to my old habit of crowding as much as possible on the page. It all looked like a grey expanse, so a bit of contrast was added -

Many of the urns came from this article, and the info about stone temple models here led to more.

From Richard - Ended up sketching dog-eared old sketch-books in caran d'ache with some wet brush. Poor attitude today, and worse perspective.

From Judith - St Pauls superimposed on a sketch from the South Bank and a rather odd collage based on drawing I did of a design on a plate by Alexander Nikolayevich Samokhvalov called ‘The Seamstress’

From Ann - I revisited a tired perspective sketch of our toilet and recreated a Roy Lichtenstein version- a less drab result! Another sketch was from the 3 jugs drawing where I  experimented with simplifying shapes and painted in gouache. The last is from a sketchbook with just a pencil circle and square on it..so I played with other shapes and added colour! 

From Joyce - Looking through my sketchbooks since 2015 when I joined the group I was amazed to see what a variety of subject matter we have had the opportunity to sketch.  I came across Blackwall by Louise Nevelson  at Tate Modern sketched in 2017 and thought it was just the kind of design I needed to stitch on a textile  piece I had prepared from rust dyed and indigo dyed fabric. It will be a boro/kantha type of stitching so  I have made a start but won’t be finished today!

I enjoyed the stitching and interpreting another piece of artwork.

From Mags - My first 'Drawing Tuesday' entries in my sketchbook  in April 2015  were of amulets in the Islamic Gallery in the British Museum.Thinking of those and the more recent sketch of the 'Talismanic Cloth' at the Brunei Gallery, I spent hours drawing a finely embroidered arm strap bought in Yazd, Iran in 2007. As ever with textiles , I prefer the back, the 'unconscious side' 

From Jo - I grabbed one of my small sketchbooks at random and it had an odd selection, starting with a view of a Liver bird in Liverpool while waiting for the ferry to depart to the Isle of Man (?2016) and ending with two things from the Greenwich Maritime Museum. There were a number of sketches for illustrations to the Three Little Pigs and Goldilocks & the Three Bears, so I looked again at those.

Had had trouble with the house of straw originally,. so had another two goes at that (suited my mood last week, the pink pig is reading The Guardian). Then tried a more advanced version from the 3 Bears - but actually like the original squiffy sketch in the book better than this "folksy" thing. Anyway - it was useful to have a go.

From Sue - Revisiting a sketch l did in 2017 of a colourful leaf. I masked it & then worked in collage to do a more graphic version. Had fun not using pencils or paint - just a few marker pen lines here & there. 

From Gill - A quick drawing with my left hand.

Just found this little sketchbook I had with me when I was at a language school in Rome about 6 years ago. I hated people looking over my shoulder whilst drawing so I went very small and tight!

FromNajlaa - This is from 2016 from in the British museum. Then, now, and also did it on a piece of card  to hang it for fun !

From Janet K - The pencil sketch of cremation urns is from the Museum of London - very wishy washy. Wanted colour so did a collage with paper from a design magazine in the weekend paper. The background is a photo of Yinka Ilori's summer pavilion at the Dulwich Picture gallery last year.

From Janet B - Facebook reminded me that four years ago at the Horniman museum I drew this ancestor sculpture. I was never happy with her face which was the wrong shape and a bit too big, although I was pleased with the rest of her, especially her hands. So time to have another go in colour. 

Studio Saturday - sketchbooks, sharpeners, shadows

An idea about colour seeping out round the edge of a hole in the darkness -

 and later I see this, at the edge of a large painting (detail shown) -

and hear a quote from Goethe, that colour is what happens at the intersection of light and dark.

Some digging deep under the workbench, to find an old sketchbook (the colourful one; 1993) -

 in which were collages that just sort of happened -

 and an outline of my favourite fairy tale, Mother Holle -

 The industrious girl gets her reward, and her lazy sister - well, she was not a pretty sight.

A flurry of pencila sharpening

 led to the imposition of order

 and the complete revamp of "the most used tools" that sit in mugs on the window ledge.

Another old sketchbook, 2017 - shadows drawn (no, traced) outside Tate Britain, with the only watersoluble pencils I possessed at the time -

 Early mornings find me sitting here, getting a dose of natural light and listening to podcasts (the newest discovery is Kitchen Sisters Presents) -

 Sunny mornings make it possible to draw the shadows of those jars of pencils -

 or to paint them -

 Two sunny mornings in a row and we have two renditions of the same scene -

Blast from the past - sketchbooks from the mid-90s

While digging out the sewing machine from under the workbench I couldn't resist revisiting just one of my old sketchbooks. Oh how I enjoyed filling them! Each term I started a new book for the new course (Creative Embroidery with Julia Caprara) and put in it not just the class work but my researches in books and museums. Outside of my fulltime job, and being a single mother, these sketchbooks were my main occupation.

These pages are some of my favourites from one of the books....

Class visit to V&A for a drawing session

Pots from the British Museum, possibly drawn on a lunch-hour visit

My focus was on the huge pots of Knossos - I filled a folder with embroidery
and felted samples, keeping for the first time to a limited range of colour

A bit off topic, but the wineglass motif was later used
(less chaotically) in the first quilt I exhibited with the Quilters Guild

 In the furthest corner under the workbench I saw this box, nicely labelled -

and left it there "for now". Coward!