Black and White

I've been busy getting pictures ready for competitions and open exhibitions I'm hoping to enter. One pen and ink piece I'm just about finishing, based on a photograph I took back in 2004 (5 years ago! Time frightens me) of a Cornish NT garden called Glendurgan, a beautiful sub tropical garden that leads down to the sea.

There's a place in the drawing that troubles me where the detail's got a bit fuzzy and any defining contrast has become lost. I'm thinking of trying to add a bit of definition with white body colour, but I'm afraid of causing more harm than good, so although my deadline is next week, I'm trying not to be too hasty. Once the deed is done there will be no turning back. That's the one thing about pen and ink, you have to get it right first time more or less, it's very difficult to right your wrongs.

I'm ever aware of the lack of colour in my work, and yet at the moment, just as the impulse is to draw instead of write, it is also to work in black and white as opposed to colour. So far my attempts to buck the trend have fizzled out as my enthusiasm fails me. One attempt, the Neolithic barrow I posted last month, is unfinished, though there are things I like about it. Another, below, in coloured pencil, has failed to spark my enthusiasm. Here's the work in progress then, but I'm not promising that I will ever finish it.