Black and White

So cold this morning that the condensation had frozen on the inside of my bedroom windows. It's been a long time since that happened!


So beautiful, and yet...brrrr....the old thermometer in our verandah has more white in it than red...it's been hanging there as long as I've lived in this house, so it's more than 40 years old...






The photo' above isn't of a bleak and desolate moorland landscape but a piece of fossil encrusted mud I picked up at Kilve Beach about 15 years ago. It's propped up against my bedroom window.


I've been working from life today, only managed 3 drawings, including this portrait of a weary looking Mom watching Loose Women. She said it doesn't look like her.


Earlier this morning I perched on a ladder upstairs on our landing to draw Mom's cardigan draped over a heap of laundered curtains and towells. I like the shapes, but my bum got rather numb sitting there for so long. It's been a very long time indeed since I worked in charcoal properly. When I was younger I liked the painterly qualities of this medium, I especially liked to use Conte crayon, because you could go very dark and moody with it. I never did like the messiness of it though, or the fact that it was so easy to smudge and ruin your hard work. Pen and ink is such a clean medium, if you can manage to avoid too many splats and blobs. But I still like the painterly moodiness of charcoal.

I've ideas for still life subjects I'd like to pursue with a mixture of drawing mediums, I'd like to work on a large scale too. But although I can see the collection of objects I want to draw in my mind's eye, do you think I can find them for real? I'll have to keep searching I suppose.