I was given a brush pen the other day and here is a little cat from my first round of experimentations. I rather like the brush pen though I haven’t really figured out how to use it properly yet. It seems to make me want to do wet-in-wet drawings though it’s probably most useful for sketching outdoors in combination with watercolour pencils. I shall have to keep experimenting.
I do love a bit of Halloween. Here is a fairly hideous pumpkin brooch I made the other day out of Fimo – it has copper powder around the amazing glow-in-the-dark eyes! I was actually aiming for scary but everything I do tends to end up looking quite cute so I had to work quite hard to make this guy look like bad news. I think I sort-of succeeded. Happy Halloween!
I was recently asked to do an illustration of a shopfront to advertise a pop-up shop which is coming to London in December. The shop in question is Anatomy Boutique, brainchild of anatomy expert and artist Emily Evans who has created a range of anatomy-based designs for a wide and gorgeous range of homeware and accessories. Anatomy Boutique will be popping up in Dalston from the 12th to the 22nd December so do go and have a look at the wonderful skull and cardiac wallpapers, the digestion plates and the histology scarves to mention just a few. My drawing was made with pen and ink and as to whether or not there will be a cat with a diamond collar in attendance when the shop opens I can’t be sure, but I’m hoping!
I went to a workshop the other day to learn how to make jewellery from silver clay. Sounds amazing doesn’t it? Well it was! The clay really is silver, in fact it is more than 99% pure which makes it a higher grade than sterling silver. I was expecting to be able to work it like I would Fimo but it is very different – much more like an air-drying clay. And the surprise was that it dries so quickly that we only had about 10 minutes to make each piece, so I felt a little nervous… But once I had got my head around that particular constraint I had lots of fun and made some nice little pendants. We were under the guidance of Emma Mitchell who is not only a silver clay expert but a fantastic teacher too. She made it all very easy for us so by the end of the morning I had managed to make all of the below. Brilliant fun!
I have just finished my roughs for the next Maisie Hitchins book so it’s time for something a little different. This is one of the drawings I have been doing lately in my sketchbook. It was made with indian ink straight from the pot using the pipette to draw with. I rather like drawing like this because it is very spontaneous and a little bit uncontrollable. When the ink was dry I gave the drawing some colour using Caran D’ache neocolours which are another one of my favourite things. They are sort of pastelly but sort of oil-pastelly too and also can be watercoloury if you wet them! I know, it’s all a bit too much…
I was looking through some old work the other day and came across these two loveheart ladies. They are made with collaged tissue paper, ink and coloured pencil. I can’t really remember what prompted me to come up with these but I always rather liked them!
I have been working hard this week trying to finish the covers for the next two Maisie Hitchins books so I’m feeling in need of a little light relief! This little fellow strolled out of my sketchbook…
Over the past week I have been helping children from Cherry Hinton, Chatteris, Bar Hill and Cambridge to make colourful, crazily collaged, crafty dragons. We had a lot of fun at the library workshops, there were wings, claws and teeth and flames everywhere and the children created a spectacular array of fire-breathers! I’d like to say a very big thank you to Cambridgeshire libraries and to the lovely librarians who helped me with my dragon workshops. Another big thank you goes out to all the children who left their dragons behind so that the libraries could make Mythical Maze displays with them! Here is my dragon together with some of its new friends…
Next week is going to be a busy one for me with workshops in Cherry Hinton, Chatteris, Bar Hill and Cambridge Central libraries. I haven’t 100% worked out what I’m doing yet but it is very likely to involve cutting, sticking and generally having quite a lot of fun making monsters! The theme of this year’s Summer Reading Challenge is Mythical Maze so I’m going to be creating some monsters that haven’t been seen in a long, long time….Sort of like these guys:
Open Studios is over! The pictures are coming down from the walls which is making us all a little bit sad, but we did have such a brilliant time. We have a bit of a taste for it now and there is talk of doing a Christmas Open Studio too so keep an eye on our Derby Road Facebook page to see what we are all up to.
I am packing up some of the pictures I sold and getting ready to deliver them to their new homes, here they are for the last time…
marion lindsay 