The use of pure line, - albeit with a little colour. Way back in the 1950s when I was serving my time as a draughtsman in structural engineering I came across architect's drawings from time to time and noticed how, unlike us in engineering, they used tone and colour to give their ideas more readable form. Needless to say the Chief Draughtsman took a very dim view of my attempts to emulate this. "Colour and shading is the realm of the artist" I was told. Draughtsmen only deal in facts or proposed facts.
Anyway, the firm went "to the wall" and I finished up in art school.
But the echoes of my involvement with technical drawing/architectural drawing remain. This image was drawn two or three years ago during a stay in St. Ives in Cornwall. Sometimes line is enough. I did this drawing on site and added some watercolour later, rather in the manner of those architects from my youth.

This figure on my Flickr badge at the moment and may rouse some curiosity. I did it a couple of years ago when I was experimenting with printing techniques. I had made the drawing from a fashion magazine photograph and then made a plate from the drawing. Drawing at a second remove as it were.The image shown here is on a piece of paper already imprinted with the pattern of annular rings that were taken from a transected tree trunk in much the same way as brass rubbings are made. This print, - no bigger than a postcard, - is the result.
The print has sat pasted to a wall in the corner of my studio since then and only recently grabbed my attention as I was taking it down from the wall. We at Luneside are in the process of clearing up. A Compulsory Purchase Order is now in force on the property we occupy so we will have to find a new home. Lancaster appears to be a city being taken over by developers. I suppose that is true for a number of places.
One positive thing I suppose, to this enforced move, is it gives us the chance to look at some archive material, some of which can be surprisingly good but some is best left forgotten. Other artists who read this blog will know exactly what I mean.

Emma Hunter is an artist at Luneside Studios in Lancaster who does abstracts with draughtsmanly qualities which I find rather exciting. An example is posted here.She makes abstract images on the paper in a very painterly way and follows this up by drawing meticulous geometric patterns. A wonderful juxtaposition.

During last year's sojourn in Cyprus we had a series of life-drawing sessions on the Saturday afternoons. For three of theses sessions we had the model in the same pose: taken from Euan Uglow's "Point Five Nude". I have an image in the Abbott Hall catalogue but am unable to reproduce it here because its too big to fit in the scanner.
However, this image is a three layer work. First it was painted as a watercolour on a piece of paper 60 cms long. The following two weeks of two hours each had me doing a finished drawing over the painted image.
Close examination will reveal that the original painting is on a different scale to the overlying drawing. This was deliberate as I wanted a certain random factor in the work. The drawing itself was executed in the same way as Euan Uglow did; precise measurement and point marking. Key reference points remained obvious. As is usual for me, the drawing was done using soft graphite.

High speed drawing, - at 70 mph. I wasn't driving I hasten to add, but sat in the front passenger seat. It made for an interesting exercise.
In life-drawing classes, sometimes the students are asked to draw very quickly with the model changing poses every 30 seconds or so. It heightens observational powers.You have to quickly decide which is the important information you need to put on the paper. I call it "outrunning a camera" which you could do in the days of mechanical, non-automatic SLRs but now with digital you just point and shoot. It can make you lazy.
But drawing just for its own sake is stil fun I guess.
Well I enjoy doing it!

Same sketchbook (2004) but the following day. This time as an outpatient at the local hospital. I was having a few hormone problems at the time and had to go in for a blood test. Lots of waiting. So I drew my right foot. The plant samples are from a garden seen through the waiting room window.
Well the drawing was a better diversion than reading the two year old women's magazines that litter NHS waiting rooms.

From earlier sketchbooks.......
This one from a small pocket book of 2004. Spread over the two pages, each page A6 size (10.5 x 15 cms). I often keep such a book by me to draw whatever is there. Sometimes it is fleeting imges seen as a passenger in a car or bus, sometimes as shown here, my own backyard, - literally.
None of these are meant to be finished drawings. They are examples of me keeping up the practice. Drawing in this manner needs to be constantly practised otherwise the quality suffers. It is not so much the technical ability to make marks on the paper as the ability to observe things and to record these observations.
The notes on these pieces read, on the left hand page, "Blue flowers in my back yard, 25 apr 04" and on the right hand page, "Backyard 25 April04 - sunny Sunday am." Next to that is a collection of words set out in the style of a haiku.
"Sunday papers
Coffee
Sunshine
Happens sometimes."

Says it all really I s'pose.

Another Dürer. The Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I couldn't resist posting this on. This work says far more than any painting could. No further comment from me is needed.

Albrecht Dürer was a German artist and a shining star of the Northern Renaissance. His draughtsmanship was absolutely superb. Records show that he spent huge amounts of time drawing. After that he did more drawing and in his spare time did a bit of ....... drawing. The above gives a good insight into what he did; a self portrait, a drawing of one of his hands, a piece of cloth. There were others contemporanious to this period; Martin Schongauer,Albrecht Altorfer to name but two. This was a golden age of draughtsmanship which alas is in my view, underrated. Museums and galleries seem only to want to show paintings and you really have to burrow to find the drawings. Why is this?
This piece, "The Piece of Turf" by Dürer is a finished work in its own right. The detailing is exquisite. Some two years ago the British Museum mountied and exhibition of Dürer's graphic work and I was able tosee some of this work for myself. The photos of it don't do justice to the work.

The boundaries between painting and drawing can get a bit blurred at times. I want to show this image from my current sketckbook of the rolling Atlantic. I drew it conventionally enough with a 4B and 2B pencil but then added a watercolour wash but used seawater instead. What we have here, with the original at any rate, is a picture of the Atlantic ocean but incorporating the waters of the Atlantic too.
Unlike when I have used water and added salt as seen on my Sept. 2 posting, sea water when it dries clumps the pigment but in a more even way.
Not so sure what the long term implications are here. Will the sea water eventually degrade the paper or for that matter, my brushes? We'll just have to wait and see.

Two studies of the waves. This first one done exclusively in dry media: 3B pencil in fact. I did about four of these letterbox shaped drawings on a single piece of A4. Again it is a view from the clifftop of the sea long before it turns into churning foam and breakers on the shore.

This next one is a look at how it turns out using varied media. Reading from the left it is in soft graphite, 3B pencil, then a thin watercolour wash and finally 50-50 application of wash and drawing.

The sea at Tintagel in Cornwall.An almost overhead view seeing I was on top of a 600 foot cliff at the time. It is an intersting viewpoint nonetheless. From this height one can see the general ebb and flow of the sea and the patterns the waves make. Its "seeing the bigger picture" as it were.
Before i went to Tintagel I prepainted some of the pages in my sketchbook; I do and abstract wash then sprinkle salt on it while the page is still wet. The salt mops up some of the pigment and when dry, leaves a random pattern and some rough texture on the paper. I then draw over this later on. The only concsious decision is to draw the sea on a blue page. This image is A4 size.