In recent weeks I have seem to have been doing a lot of work on my drawing, and I have started really to enjoy it, and to believe that I can draw what I want to my satisfaction. I did a great on-line drawing course with Access Art which is a website and resource mainly for art teachers but also for people like me who are interested in drawing and thinking skills. There were lots of lovely confidence building exercises, and it’s a bit of a shame that they have taken the galleries down because there as some nice work. Here’s a continuous line drawing of some trees from a walk with my dog, Harry, and of buttercups and clover, in which I learned continuous line drawing works best with fairly fine media like pens or harder pencils:
An interesting sideline to this is that I have started doing a lot more drawing in my workbooks. So, for example, while I was at my mother’s I read an article in one of her patchwork magazines about finding inspiration for quilting designs and working them up rather than just taking a photo. So here is a page from my workbook/sketchbook on adapting a photograph of some wall paper from a magazine:
And the same from a piece of computer woven silk in the exhibition currently on in Nottingham Castle Museum, using images from the leaflet which accompanied the show:
This one was interesting to me because I had intended to sit down and work with the outline of the robe, which I think is wonderful and which I have used before. I fancied making a quilt using the outline in a lot of very decorative fabrics using fusible applique which I might still do, but in the event it was looking closely at the images from silk on the left hand side of the photograph which turned out to be the source of inspiration for continuous line quilting.
So, I am very struck, once again, by the delight in using a skill. I think of the current B&Q TV advertisement – which is a DIY superstore in the UK – with ‘ordinary people’ standing back saying, ‘I did this.’ It’s a bit tacky but that feeling of accomplishment in the work of the hands is something I really understand, and something I think, if enough people experienced it, would be a societal good. Making, as I have observed with others before, is connecting.
By the way: for some reason I cannot get the photograph of the drawing of beads at the top of this post the right way up. I have tried several times, but I think you get the idea.
