Portrait session

Another Royal Drawing School evening workshop. Here are a couple of drawings done with ink brush pen and water. We were given 5-15 minutes. The model sat beautifully still BUT the same could not be said for her features! She had a wonderfully twitchy nose like a rabbit and eyes which went from near asleep to wide open!

Life drawing at home!

This Royal Drawing School evening was arranged with the Getty Museum! And participants from all over the world. Here are my drawings:

The last was the life model on the right and from a screen version on the left – the life drawing is the one before.

I guess it is easier to draw from the model when it’s on-screen as it’s 2D already but it does feel different to drawing from a photo somehow.

On a day when my feet were two blocks of ice all day I went to the De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill to see an exhibition of work by Betty Parsons (1900-1982). I had never heard of her but it’s a nice place and by the sea. There were paintings and assemblages made from ‘acrylic on found wood constructions’. Here are some I liked:

Year end

Here are some small Minimalist Abstractions done with ink. I can never resist seeing a subject even when my intention is to be abstract!

?Flats
?Postbox
?Train
?Christmas stocking
?Fight

And some pieces I saw which to me look random but are meaningful: at Tate Modern – huge aboriginal paintings glowing with colour. The art of Emily Kam Kngwarray

New source of fun

I recently saw an ad for the Royal Drawing School and had a look at the extensive list of activities, many online. I signed up for a 2-hour workshop on the Nutcracker Story. Here are some of the sketches I made of Clara with the Nutcracker, Clara killing the Mouse King, Snowflake Chorus, Clara dreaming:

Klimt on the heels of Kandinsky

I still have suggestions I should follow about Kandinsky but they are for another day. I went onwards with looking at some Klimt works. The course was not as specific and even included some AI artwork to follow. Think I prefer to use the original. I decided to use a little angel that came from a charity shop as the model for my work and made three versions based on different well-known Klimt pictures. Reportedly the works took 3 years but as they are huge and include gold work etc. I am not surprised – it took me long enough to work A4 size!

  • after The Kiss
  • after Tragedy
  • after Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer

Collage with Lynn Whipple

Here are the two collages I made for this short workshop. The under-layer is random scraps of ‘stuff’ to make a decorative base. You can’t see a lot of it remaining in the first one but the scraps are outlined with smudged pencil. The second one was done with coloured papers by Lynn but I didn’t have any so I used pictures torn from a Food magazine from Waitrose.

My sort of Kandinsky landscapes!

Market town in Estonia
Garden feature at Arundel Castle
Waterfront at Fowey
  • Market in Estonia (from a photo taken by a friend)
  • water feature at Arundel Castle
  • the waterfront at Fowey.

And my ATCs for our group for this quarter based (loosely!) on Kandinsky’s ‘Thirty’ executed on my iPad using Procreate – each one 2.5 x 3.5 inches and a visual challenge.

Kandinsky continues

The landscapes are coming. But here is another exercise based on his ’30’:

As the topic for our ATC group for QIV Oct-Dec 2025 is:

‘an all black and white one – it might just be the ticket to end this year’

I have based my set on the ’30’ theme and will upload them when I’ve sent my cards out to the group. To work so small (2.5 inches x 3.5 inches) I made them on the iPad using Procreate. I think I was cross-eyed by the end of the many hours it took, doing one or two at a time.

I went to Tate Modern to see Picasso . The space was rather dark because of the fine line etchings I guess but it made it hard for older eyes to see! Loved seeing The Three Dancers ‘in the flesh’ – it makes such a difference seeing pictures you know from books the real size. It is the dancers’ centenary appearance.

October 2025

  • Visit to Hastings Contemporary to see their three new exhibitions. Colour in Sophie Barber’s work completely mind-blowing – the illustrated sun over sea does not do it justice.
  • Begun exercises in 2LilOwls course on Kandinsky. Here are my efforts at concentric circles in squares:
  • Now to tackle landscape in Kandinsky colour!

All change

Looking over my site, I see I have failed to keep up with everything. So instead of trying to do the ATC page, the Diary page etc. etc. I will just put everything here as a post and maybe I shall do better. The disadvantages of age have stopped me getting to as many exhibitions as I once did for my Diary entries but our ATC group has kept going through the seasons and the international friends I write to seem familiar even though I have only met two of the group. I have also done a few courses and enjoy those that have Facebook groups where others can also post their results. These are both things that online connection has made possible – international contacts and working from home are both so marvellous. So from now I intend to keep up with something even if it’s a ragbag!

I did make it to the near final day of Sussex Modernism in Eastbourne which was great. My art magazines tell me there are lots of lovely sounding exhibitions around so I hope to get to some of them.

I have just finished a colour revision course and am now taking part in one on Kandinsky.

Our latest ATC topic was for QIII JULY-SEPT 2025:

Using letters somehow might be nice.  So there we have it.  Letters is the theme.  That is very broad and so be it.  Of course, as usual, if you do not like the theme go ahead with anything you like.

As usual members have interpreted this in different ways which is what makes it fun.

So here’s to a future for my site with more posts even if all the topics are now jumbled together!

Lydia Rink Art Mixed Media Festival

I have been participating in this: 10 artists’ lessons and a Facebook page to show my results. Not everyone who was signed up posted their work which was a shame as it was nice to see what other people made of the demos. Here are the pieces I posted which I did in my A4 concertina sketchbook to keep them in one place. One demo was intended to be folded into a minibook and another was to make a triptych but otherwise it was okay done this size and the paper of the book is surprisingly resilient to gesso, ink, glue etc.

Concertina sketchbooks

I’ve been following some online workshops with Karen Stamper using these books. So far I’ve found the smallest too small, A5 just about right and A4 too big as it takes so long to do a spread and I can’t fit many pages on my table at once. I could turn each book over and complete the other side as well but I think I will just start a new book.