Black box

 I've discovered a new toy :) Or rather, a new technique. If you read my last post you'll remember that I photographed something in a black mirror before drawing it. The results were fantastic so I've pretty much spent all my free time since stuffing things into the felt lined box I created to go with it and snapping away.

 There is a bit of an art to it - to photograph a reflection, you have to adjust your focus to cover the distance from your lens to the mirror - and back again. Then of course there's the issue of lighting the object without shining light on the mirror or towards the camera.

 The results are worth it though - I started with a deer skull and took two photographs of its reflection using different lighting. That completely transformed it as you can see from the resulting drawings here - they don't look like the same object in both at all.

I then drew the images out on Fabriano Artistico paper using charcoal pencil for the details and pure carbon stick to get that gorgeous velvety black background. You can buy the drawings framed and ready to go over in my Etsy shop.

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.