Home is where the art is

 In case you've been wondering what I'm up to (always suspicious when artists are quiet), I moved house just over a week ago to the lovely Whitby on the North Yorkshire coast.

 There were several reasons for this but the main benefit from a creative point of view is the amazing location - lots of places to go walking and a great atmosphere.

The setup in this flat is different - I'm now working in a corner of our lounge so I've taken over one of our computer desks to make best use of the space, with halogen lights to compensate for the lower lighting.

It must be doing me good too - I'm already working on a new piece, the next in my series of spice sketches. This one is a dried lime cut in half - fiddly but with some fantastic lines and intense contrast. Like the others, when completed it will be framed in a 6" oak frame and put up for sale in my Etsy shop.

I say potato.....

 

 I think one of the reasons art fascinates people is the way it allows you to see for a moment through someone elses' eyes, to get a new perspective. This goes for us artists too so I'm especially excited to bring you two very different takes on the same thing.

Tina Mammoser is a friend of ours and very kindly invited Rich and I to share her holiday spot at Saltwick Bay for a weekend. When we went exploring, we found the wreck of the Admiral Von Tromp framed perfectly by black rock. Naturally, neither of us could resist so we agreed to work from the same image and publish our results together.

Rock and Wreck by Tina Mammoser

Tinas' approach couldn't be more different - while I'm driving myself batty fiddling about with every pebble in the landscape, she gets straight to the heart of the matter. The focus in her picture is different too - Tina has used the strong lines of the wreck to frame the fantastic Black Nab to great effect. You can view Tinas' work including Rock and Wreck here .

Wreck and Rock by Karen Ruffles

On the flip side, I was most excited about the looming hulk of the wreck and included Black Nab in silhouette to help place the wreck. I used carbon pencil for the wreck itself so it's an even darker black than the surrounding rocks. You can see this piece over in my Etsy shop .

For further amusement, you can read Tinas' blog post here

Wreckage

Saltwick bay photograph

I'm now around two thirds of the way through my first drawing of Saltwick Bay here in North Yorkshire. It started with a couple of snaps I'd taken while on holiday - I hadn't expected much from them because I didn't want to interrupt our time off by getting all artsy with the camera. When I got back, I looked at the one above and decided I could do something with it.

Hour 4 of my wreck and rock drawing

 As usual I'm working on Fabriano Artistico extra white - a lovely smooth paper great for getting sharp lines. I normally work in charcoal pencil but since the wreck cast a shadow you could almost reach out and touch, I needed something even blacker than that !

Hour  9 of my wreck and rock drawing

So, it's out with the Wolffs carbon pencil again - I love these because they produce such a rich, velvety black but unfortunately they also produce an amazing amount of fine dust that sticks to everything...

I'm also still using charcoal pencil for very fine detail, it's harder and can be sharpened to a needle point so I'm tracing the outlines with that, filling in with carbon and blending it up to the edge. That way I've got a lovely crisp silhouette with the added impact of the carbon. I'm hoping to have this one done in the next week or two as I'm keen to get stuck into its mate - a view of the imposing rock formation in the background. Will keep you posted :)

My dark tower...

 We were lucky this weekend to be invited to join artist Tina Mammoser on a stay near Whitby. We only live up the road but working from home, it's somehow so much harder to organise time away so we jumped at the opportunity. On Sunday, we braved the weather to go explore Saltwick Bay, at one end of which stands the impressive Black Nab, which I naturally made a beeline for...

Black rock formation on a bed of shale, sillhouetted against a cloudy sky - what more could a goth artist ask for ? Just when I thought it couldn't get any better, we dicovered that close by lie the remains of the Admiral Von Tromp which ran aground in 1976 under mysterious circumstances.

 

 

 Many people have obviously taken amazing photographs of the rich landscape there and I'm not going to pretend I've achieved anything of the sort but the great thing about being an artist is... it doesn't matter :) I've picked these three to start working on and I'll do more editing to bring out the reflections on the rock but for quick snaps taken on the hoof, I'm really rather pleased. I'll definitely be going back but I can see the potential for charcoal drawings in these so I'm just going to get on with it.

You can remind me I said that.

Pointed

 After much faffing about, I've finally picked out the next group of photos to work from. I'm scaling up slightly from the recent insect studies so I can do justice to this set taken by me at Spurn Point a few weeks ago.

 My personal favourite is the one above- looks to me like a small, rather astonished rabbit :) That amusement aside I love the contrasting texture between the weathered wood and smooth pebbles.

 I've ordered in more of my beloved Fabriano Aristico, because there really is no comparison with other papers when you want crisp, fine detail and high contrast. I'll be working in charcoal pencil again and posting updates as the drawing progress.

I'm reckoning on a series of three and the two colour pics here are potentials for the next piece but that might depend on just how crackers I go with all those pebbles.....feel free to remind me that I thought it was a  good idea at the time !