Let's Talk Art Blog

I started this sketch with blind contour drawing, just looking at what I could see from my workbench to get some shapes down on the paper. And then this one went for a real wander! There is a long messy middle to this one as I played around with balancing the colour triad of Yellow-Green, Red-Orange and Blue-Violet. The challenging colour palette and very few printed collage papers in my stash in these colours, led to me using plenty of paint on this one.

I had a session playing around with the gelli plate, with no set intentions to create anything other than interesting experimental prints I could use for collage. You might recognise some of these as pieces as I used some of them in my 'Dusty Summer' Sketch. I used wet strength tissue, cartridge paper and copy paper, in no particular order!

I was feeling like a quick dabble in something other than greens today. I also dug out my paint pens for some of the details. I'm not sure if I really get along with them, but these sketches are a great place to try them out. Are you a fan of paint pens? Maybe I just need more practice with them.

Playing with structure, colour, shape and space are recurring themes for me and in the case of this sketch - verticals in particular!

Following on from my current painting series, I've been having a play around with transposing some of my drawings using the gel plate, which resulted in some really interesting collage papers. I decided to start this sketch on gessoed paper with some big collage pieces to see what happened, instead of my usual line-based starter pieces.

I took a quick break from my bigger paintings last week and had a go with using gessoed mixed media paper as a substrate for this sketch. There's something lovely about painted paper - maybe it's the way the paint goes on, or the way it sits when it's on there...not sure. But I have a thing for it!