It has been a while, but I have been active. I have participated in two art exhibitions with two drawings displayed in each.
The first exhibition I placed a pair of A3 size drawings of birds of prey. These were based on photographs I have taken in various parts of the country.
The second exhibition arranged by SCAVA ended a few weeks ago. For this latter event I placed a pair of portrait style drawings of rhino. One white or wide lipped, the other black, or hook lipped. Both are endangered species due to the strange belief that eating the horn enhances libido – there is no limit to the stupidity of humans!
These four drawings occupied most of my time though I did also complete three other drawings on this scale, but they are not framed and remain in my ‘archive.
Two of them are portraits of a dancer I know through the local camera club. She poses for the club and that is where I obtained images of her.
My final drawing of 2025 was an A3 drawing of my mum 😊 I used a photograph I took of her many years ago as the basis for the drawing.
The new year – 2026
I am on a sort of ‘roll’ with my drawing but all this work is based on photographs. I have always admired artists who can draw people and scenes ‘out of their head’. Consider all those comic book artists out there creating super-heroes doing dynamic stuff in totally imaginary situations.
Most arty types I know would say ‘that is not art’ and if pushed admit they could not produce such images anyway!
It’s a challenge – and my early efforts at figure drawing under Paul Birchall began with his instruction ‘draw a person’, don’t look for a photograph, draw what is in your head. I drew about seventy figures, in various states of disarray and corrected my ‘mental model’ of human proportion and anatomy after review and feedback.
That was five years ago and where all that material is now is anyone’s guess. I have moved city since then!
I began this year, 2026, needing a new challenge or direction for my art. I decided that something along the lines of a graphic novel was something I could enjoy.
I have been inspired by authors like Marcos Mateu-Mestre who wrote ‘Framed Ink’, as well as Michael Mattesi who wrote ‘Force’. I read these whilst doing curator duty at the art exhibitions.
Following Paul’s instructions of years ago, I started drawing ‘out of my head’. This did not work too well. So, I hauled out my Andrew Loomis books and used his method to construct a realistic head. That took about one hundred head drawings. I did say it was a challenge – didn’t I?
From heads I moved on to the full figure. This was less traumatic and after two sheets of scrap paper I decided it was time to move on. My efforts several years ago obviously were still with me. It was also by then the end of the month so time to get on with it.
February thus began with the invention and publication of ‘Gina the Geologist’ guiding a party of local hill walkers through the geological aspects of the mountains.
I developed the story as I went along, each drawing was scanned and placed in MS PowerPoint. There i used the packaged to create word bubbles, type in text, and create frames for each element. Then I copied and pasted the entire panel into a MS Word document. To distribute the material I save the document as a pdf file so that it can be seen as I intend it to look.
