Preparing for an exhibition

The exhibition I'm going to hold at the library is in 2 glass cases at the top of the stairs in the main foyer area of the building.  I held an exhibition there in 2011.  The cases are surprisingly spacious and so I've been planning what material I have and how much I will need to fill that space.  Like before I've made a plan in the back garden with string and various bits of paper cut to the size of existing pieces...

Then I've drawn a plan showing these pieces in situ, marking in red things which I don't have yet (titles, accompanying text etc...) so I know what I've got to get ready to take with me in December.

I've decided to theme the exhibition around the flower drawings I've been doing this year, and to split the 2 cases into work done in dip pen and ink from my photographs in the left hand case and in the right hand case I will show the drawings I've made from life.  These are done in sketchbooks, in fibre pens of varying thickness.  I will show prints of the pages from the sketchbooks and the sketchbooks themselves.

I've made a timetable and hopefully I'll have everything ready in December.

Here's a piece I finished earlier this month.  It's called 'Tearful Rose' and it's in coloured acrylic inks applied with dip pen.

Sunflowers and wayside poppy

I've been working through the course I mentioned in my previous post.  I'm finding this really helpful and it has shaken up lots of different ways of thinking and ideas that I hope to develop. 

I'm not rushing through it, as I've got quite a few other things on my plate at the moment (IT course, general DIY jobs, my part-time job at the library and the exhibition I'm planning to hold there in December).  Also my main purpose in doing this course was to motivate myself into other ways of approaching my work, of levering myself away (or at least get breathing space from) my dependency on photographs.

Our garden is a tiny oasis in the urban environment in which I live.  I've spent quite a lot of time there through the summer, and now summer is drawing to a close I'm making as much use of it as I can, enjoying the huge sunflowers I've managed to raise this summer.  Some of them are well over 7ft tall!  I've never managed to get them so tall before. 

My routine has become to work for about an hour or so from the course then, with the principles gleaned from the course still buzzing in my head, to work an hour or more drawing from life.  These drawings are done in fibre tip pens of varying nib size and they're done quickly.  Here are a couple of small ones I made last week.

Indoors I continue working with dip pen and increasingly coloured ink rather than my usual black Indian ink.

This piece is very small (about 13cm x 11cm) and I made it deliberately with a few aims in mind:-

• I wanted to finish something quickly, ideally within a week
• I wanted to produce something primarily in line that I can experiment with perhaps adding colour either onto the drawing itself, onto a print of the drawing or onto a digital image of the drawing using Photoshop.

I'll post progress of this when there is any!