Rotten Strawberry

so, the 'blonde' (such as it was) is no more. the roots came through thick and fast and dark and despite my hopes i didn't manage to carry off the look in a vampy trampy cool way (?!).

i'm now ginger (or auburn) - i seem to be gradually making my way back to the dark brown hair i started with through a rainbow series of regular dyeing sessions.

my artwork has suffered from a bit of a change in routine since i started my new job a few weeks ago. however, i do have half the working week to myself to work on my projects. it has taken me that time to decide what to do and now the sun's out, i'm procrastinating again!

my first plan was to do a large pencil drawing of a peacock, making a feature of those beautiful tail feathers (collapsed rather than the traditional displayed view). i was making good progress and was really focussed until my cat walked blue inkjet ink from my source photo onto the drawing. It will not come off - if anyone has any tips, i'd be grateful! i've had to scrap that project, and couldn't bring myself to start again (i'd worked for about 12 hours on it already). here's how far i got on filling in my outline...i was really enjoying it, but now can't face doing it again. besides i have a nagging doubt about the quality of the composition, which i think is really stopping me.

meantime, i embarked on an experiment into the world of pastel drawing. my first attempt, using pastel pencils and mi-teintes paper (smoother side) resulted in this:this was a fairly small drawing. i'm quite pleased with it (although i'm biased because it is my cat!). here is my work on a pretend dog portrait (taken from a copyright free source on the internet):i was pleased with this to a degree, but have learned a huge amount along the way. i am used to working in a very tight, neat style with my graphite pencils, and i need to learn to adapt to this different medium: to work lighter; choose appropriate colour paper so i'm not fighting to cover the background all the time; choose background colour better; keep the dust blown away in the right direction, and so on. i will be practising more with pastels, but they are soooo messy and dry my fingers out like crazy!

my next project and ultimate goal for the next year is to develop a great portfolio of bird drawings. i'm starting with a set of seagull drawings (i have begun work on seagull number 1, but have no preview for you as yet), and we'll see where it goes from there.