Project "Larus Argentatus"

...that's the latin name for herring gull! - the subject of my next study. i love seagulls and think many people miss their elegance and beauty because they are rather abundant and can be quite opportunistic (even marauding!).

people don't like 'opportunistic' animals. we HATE pigeons, squirrels, foxes and so on, because they have made the best out of our slovenly habit of not clearing up properly after ourselves: they are survivors and are often wily and intelligent and have grown bold in our presence. people don't like that - i think it tramples on our superiority complex: the traditional view of nature and wildlife is that it is frightened, wary and respectful of us. but these guys feed on our excesses, have the NERVE live in our lofts and under our sheds. it upsets me when perfectly nice people say that they 'hate' pigeons: why? they're cool little birds that have learned to live in our urban spaces (which would be duller without them). granted they can carry disease - but they only get them because we're the dirty ones! and i've not heard of anyone who has contracted a disease via that notorious vector of death, the feral pigeon, have you?

i digress.... seagulls. this is a picture of a work in progress of the first drawing of a set of four planned seagull drawings. it is a herring gull descending to land. all graphite on mellotex. background is blended graphite (with stump).

I will do more background once the bird is more drawn. I don't want to overkill it too soon. (pic is from a digital photo rather than a scan, as drawing is fairly large - see below pic of my desk with drawing on for some idea of scale)

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.