A beach at St. Ives, when the tide is out. I drew this on site last year. I was impressed by the pattern of the sand and the shimmering of the reflected sun.
Thought I would show this one as I will be in Cornwall, Tintagel this time, for a couple of weeks. There will be no more postings until I get back to Lancaster at the end of August.
Drawn in pencil in an A4 drawing book on 150 gsm paper.

Up to now I have shown "finished" drawings. This example is from one of my sketchbooks. Lets call it "Harvest" for indded that is what it is. Felled trees stacked up waiting to be taken to the sawmills. These tree ends make for an interesting pattern. Subjects like this seem to be popular with photographers if what I see in the photography magazines is anything to go by. I did this one during a stint as volunteer warden at Byrness Youth Hostel in the heart of the Border Forest. There was a bit of a breeze blowing at the time which means the midges left me alone to get on with it. This was drawn using 3B and 4B pencils plus a little bit of blue wash. The tone was softened by rubbing in with a Kleenex.
Overhead there was what I took to be a buzzard wheeling majestically round. When I looked more closely I could see it had white bars on its wings and tail. "White tailed eagle?" Surely not. You only see those in wild and remote places. Then I reminded myself that is exactly where I was. Later, back at the Hostel I checked in my bird book. Yup! It was a white tailed eagle.
That is one thing about drawing out in the field as it were, being still and quiet as I draw, wildlife often does come remarkably close.

Spithope Three, the right hand panel of the triptych. Now purists may well argue this is a painting, not a drawing and in one sense they would be right. However if you ever get to see the original in my studio in Lancaster it would quickly become apparent this really is a drawing. I think I mentioned in the posting showing the triptych in its entirety that I laid down some water colour first then drew on top of it. The application of water colour approximated where things are but the subsequent layering up using drawing media set the thing a bit more accurately. What in fact I did do was draw in exactly the same way as the centre panel but onto a pretinted paper.
So the entire work shows a progression reading from left to right from a pure line drawing through to an elaborate fully developed image. We could use a musical analogy here; imagine a theme played initially on a solo piano, then by a string quartet and finally by a small orchestra. (I shall leave full blown symphony orchestras for large paintings!) .

Spithope Two. This is the centre image of the triptych. The middle of the picture is a bit bleached out due to the light reflected of the glossy graphite surface. The intensely dark areas are created using very soft graphite (12B) worked if not ground into the very fabric of the paper which has already had similar treatment with charcoal.
You really get you hands dirty doing this but it is a highly satisfying technique. The end product is a surface not unlike a photographic print.

Spithope One. Let's call it that. The left hand component of the Triptych. Spithope (pron: spit-hope) is a remote small valley running fron the Anglo-Scottish border southwards into Redesdale. It is a rather remote spot.
Here we can see where only line has been used. Some might argue that line only is the purest form of drawing. Here the foreground trees and the ground itself is shown in contour. Tone only occours as a backdrop. At full size this image is 42 cms square as are the other two which I shall post later.
This finished work was made in the studio but I did spend a couple of hours doing the preliminary sketches getting a sore bum from sitting on a rock and being eaten alive by midges. Who says I don't suffer for my art?
And yes I did take a few photos as well.

This triptych shows a continuous stretch of forest but divided into three distinct sections each demonstrating a different approach. The left hand image is drawn in pure line. What tone there is, is done as hatching, exclusively in pencil. The centre image is more developed in that tonal values are expressed in graphite and with some charcoal underlay, - almost a "painting" using drawing materials. The image on the right of the triptych, being in colour is rather more painterly but drwing elements remain. The colour was laid down as watercolour but not placed too accurately. Then, once the paper had dried,it was overdrawn using the techniques outlines before. The object of the colur is to provide tinting in much the same way as early black and white photographs were tinted. Not a true dense colour but simply an indication. This work is intended to bring attention to the drawing.
I shall post the three separate images over the next few days so that it can be examined in more detail.

During a residency last year in Cyprus I made this A1 (120 x 84cm) graphite drawing on 300gsm cartridge of an anchor chain embedded in the sand near a boatyard in Limassol. The whole thing showed theobjects as life size.
I had omitted to bring some slides of my work with me to show to the students there so instead made this large drawing as an ongoing demonstration of what I do. It served to illustrate both perception and technique.
This sheer size of this work made it too unwieldly to draw on site. This work was made from a photograph and some smaller sketches.

Back in November 2004 I went on a Mediteranean cruise and had the good fortune to have a cabin almost at sea level. We would set sail from whichever harbour we had visited that day and I would sit in my cabin watching the sea go by in the fading light. Eventually the light would become monochrome. This gave excellent opportunities for black and white drawing. I would fill page after page of my sketchbook until the light failed completely. This image is of a large (A2) drawing I did in the studio from these sketches.As this was a sailing ship, the Windsurf, there was no disturbance of the waves, therefore no bow wave and very little wake. Just the endless rolling sea. There's something eternal about the sea; so vast. Two thirds of the planet's surface is covered by it. Thats a whole lot of sea.

Black and White photography is an important influece in my work. I see black and white photographs in the same context as drawings in the same way colour photography can be analogous to paintings.
Paintings tend to be looked at as the "finished" article by some sectors of the public but I maintain that drawings, - finished drawings as opposed to sketches, - stand as finished works of art in their own right.
This example here, though not entirely monochrome, - there is some tinting of the tree trunk, - is called, not surprisingly, "Greenstem".
It is a study of the lower stem of a coniferous tree and presented in the way it would confront you were you to encounter it in the forest. In the drawing I have mainly used soft graphite (9B or 12B) and 6B for the finer lines. It is drawn on Fabriano textured paper 400gsm. I like this heavy paper for its texture and its ability to withstand being assaulted by me grinding in the graphite untill it becomes an integral part of the paper. Putty rubbers water spraying are other agencies brought into play for a work like this. The work measures 45 x 65 cm.

Another example of the use of pure line, again using only a technical pencil (.5mm lead). Here it is used to trace the contours of the trees.This is drawn from life.

A figure study to start with. From time to time we at Luneside Studios run life drawing sessions. These are open to friends of the studio, a limited number of artists known to us and some bona fide students as well as ourselves.
This particular study was done in 2004. I deliberately limited my media to a micro pencil with a 0.5mm lead. These pencils are an echo from my engineering drawing days of a lifetime ago. It is a good exercise to sometimes restrict the medium and thereby explore its (sometimes hidden) possibilities.
This drawing is about 42 cm square. It was drawn on a sheet of A2 paper cut down to a square format. For some reason I seem to prefer this [square] format just now.