For this exercise, I decided to use my kitchen sink as the basis for a swimming pool scene. This gave me the opportunity to explore reflections on water, reflections on flat and curved surfaces and […]

Jaws – Steven Spielberg – 1975 Another storyboard. I feel I spent rather too much time on the earlier ones so wanted to do something quickly with sustained effort over a shorter time period – […]

Hmm. I started out using a very thick, tacky, water-based relief ink. It worked great for the abstract stuff but very difficult to work with here. See the two lower, aborted pieces. It was just […]

I found this exercise unexpectedly problematic. Clearly too much ink in the lower image but then when I tried with less, I had too little! I suspected the thick and tacky relief ink was part […]

Based on previous experiments, I’ve found that torn-up newspaper gives good results with the thick relief ink I’m using. I’ve also tried thin pheasant-tail grass stems and heads but with limited success. I’m also using […]

I’ve found that masking areas with objects produces some rather uninspiring and blurry-outlined negative spaces. However, if I remove the objects and then take another print, magic happens and lots of lovely detail. I’m using […]

Raising Arizona – The Coen Brothers – 1987 When I googled the script for this, I found a version that included scene descriptions and camera positions and movements, which I have included to the right […]

Lawrence of Arabia – David Lean – 1962 The classic introduction of Omar Sharif’s character. With my new-found ability to digitally cut-out drawn characters, I decided to create the backdrops for these cells from the […]

A study of Käthe Kollwitz’s Whetting the Scythe – pencil and charcoal. I lost concentration here when doing the initial sketching out and have ended up with an elongated composition – the original is roughy […]

Here I am applying some of the techniques used by Egon Schiele to make the compositions more interesting and to create more dramatic negative spaces – letting the hands touch or overshoot the edges of […]

I was having trouble finding a suitable set of objects around the house that were of similar form, size and colour so got a little … creative and decided to play with scale. The brief […]

A few Egon Schiele studies, paying specific attention to the treatment of negative space. Interesting the way the figures carve up the canvas by touching or going beyond the edges. Also, they sometimes rest on […]

Colin walks into a bar. The bartender asks “why the long face?” Colin replies “oh I’m fine – I’m just drawn that way”. Freestyle from a selfie. It’s me (ish) alright but a very elongated […]

A revisit of the cupboard exercise (but with the fridge!). Two vanishing points this time – one for the fridge interior and one for the door. The door actually has another one – far off […]

Colour pencil on white card. An electric precision eraser is giving me new mark-making options – especially the ability to precisely lift off dots of material – so little dots are working overtime here – […]

Kollwitz. A copy of an early self-portrait – unburdened by the cares weighing on later works. The original is in pen and ink so she must have nailed every stroke first time, every time – […]

Another exercise from Experimental Drawing by Robert Kaupelis. The challenge here was to render some eggs in multiple colours but whose local colour should read as white. Coloured pencil on grey paper. The reflected green […]

Trying here an exercise from Experimental Drawing by Robert Kaupelis. The direction is to: set up a still life; capture some horizontals, verticals and diagonals; apply tones to the resultant shapes in a random fashion […]

Exploring composition … All unbalanced in terms of overall picture composition but I’m as much interested in the shadows as the rest. I’ve chosen the set-up bottom right (against instinct) because the lighting of the […]

Ah… vacado. A rotting specimen. Daylight from behind and a small lamp to the left. The hollow in the right half of the fruit doesn’t immediately present itself as such (to me anyway). Why? What […]

Single-point perspective with the horizon line at the bottom shelf front edge. I have given the actual visible bits a darker outline and added some shading to the cupboard itself but not the objects within.

A wi-fi range extender and a google smart speaker, lit from the left with ambient daylight. I have deliberately chosen objects of the “now” rather than timeless things like cups, jugs, fruit, etc. Not sure […]

A small sub-woofer, satellite speaker and orange glass lamp. All the preceding corner drawings have strong lines so going for something a bit different here – trying to avoid outlines where possible. Also couldn’t resist […]

The back of the house with the media stand, the electric fire and the bi-fold doors looking out onto decking. This started out almost like an isometric drawing – all parallel lines – but I […]

EX 3: I found this surprisingly difficult at first. I am obviously extremely rusty at this. My hand felt tense and the line just didn’t flow. Things improved slightly with repetition but drawing the outside […]

Not really feeling the first bit of the exercise. Here is a selection of pages with a selection of marks. If I had to characterise any of them then .. maybe … one is “flames”, […]