Saturday 25 August 2012

Hermitage

 I'm very pleased today to reveal the finished drawing of the little hermit crab I started a couple of weeks ago. I had to stop so far through to complete the pet portrait I'd been commissioned to do so must admit the last leg (no pun intended) was a bit harder to do.


 I'd taken a photo of this rockpool dweller when I was living in Cornwall and decided he would make a fantastic charcoal study. He has beautiful markings and the texture on his claws when you get up close is incredible.


 I did this one on Langton hot press watercolour paper with my favourite charcoal pencils. He took nine and a half hours to complete and the finished piece is around 19cm wide (drawn area).


I'm thinking of switching soon to Fabriano Artistico paper which I've used before as it's amazingly crisp and white so for such tiny detail, maybe better than the Langton. Will let you know :)

Monday 20 August 2012

Puppy love

I've been busy the last week with a custom piece- the first pet portrait I've done in many years. I rather went off the idea after struggling with a lot of very fuzzy photos taken by proud owners so I insisted on seeing the image first.


However, when confronted by this little face, I couldn't really say no :) You'll have to excuse the image being a little dark- he was being shipped to New York asap so I only had time to take a quick snap myself of the finished piece.

He was done as usual in charcoal pencil on Langton watercolour paper, the drawn area is about 8" square. The white whiskers were picked out with a scalpel blade after the background had been filled in.

I've just heard he's arrived safely across the pond so am waiting for news from his new owner :)

Wednesday 1 August 2012

Crabby

 Since posting my progress on the snail drawing caused so much general amusement, I've decided to keep it up with my latest project.


 I took this photo when I was living in Cornwall and had been meaning to do something with it ever since. Because I've moved house and generally had a lot going on, it's been difficult to knuckle down to anything on a grand scale so I decided to approach the problem from the other end of the scale :)


By picking something that has an awful lot of tiny detail and just doing an hour a day which is frankly about as much of that sort of thing as the eyeballs will take, I'm getting something of a routine going and it's paying off. My shop is filling up again with new work and I've found inspiration again by doing something new. You can follow my adventures in charcoal on my facebook page.