Apart from things I had to do I’ve been having a rest from drawing. Playing with the spirogragh is an exception. Mostly I’m mulling things over, thinking about what I might do next (art wise) and getting ready for moving. A few months ago my landlord raised my rent and it means I need to move as it’s just too high, and frankly the house isn’t worth it. This is not so bad as I do, in fact, want to move, but it’s  hastened things a little. However, I do need to do a few things to this house before I go - like painting the room I use as a studio - I’ve spent the last few years splashing paint and ink around and writing poetry on the walls: It’s time to be a sober grown up again (well, just for a little while) and make those walls white. So it’s going to be a busy couple of months ahead of me, I think.

I’m aiming to move by the end of September - the best time of year for me to move: years of school then academia have conditioned me into starting new things in September. Living opposite a school for the last three years has only reinforced this pattern. If I wasn’t going to move I’d have to do a course or something, just to satisfy this inner conviction that something must be started come the autumn.

15×21cm, ink and coffee

This is becoming a habit. Every Friday a lost thing - I have a few more of these planned so it will continue. Unfortunately I can’t shoehorn this one into the Illustration Friday topic, which is punchline. Great for the cartoonists, and I can certainly think of one or two (probably obvious) gags, but I don’t feel inspired to draw them at all. Oh well, next week perhaps.

On a completely different and completely unconnected note I joined my local food co-op recently. If there’s one of these near you and you don’t belong, get yourself down there. I now buy all my basic foodstuffs from there at only 3% mark up! Even the organic products are incredibly cheap because of this, and there’s no packaging to dispose of (I take my own containers). And of course the money I do spend is spent ethically which is something I aim for.

And speaking of food - since I gave up coffee and sugar and manged to get my blood sugar under control I’ve stopped craving sweet stodgy things just before my period. I haven’t lost my taste for sweet things altogether, just the desire to binge on them.  It had definitely helped the PMS/PMDD too, as has the fantastic progesterone cream I’m using. It has taken a few months but I feel so much better now - it’s great.

Have a good weekend all you bloggers out there.

6 x 8.25 inches, technical pen on coffee stained paper

To my surprise the second of the lost thing drawings also seems, to my mind anyway, appropriate for the IF topic.

I’ve been asked a few times about staining paper with coffee - how to do it, or why mine looks good (it doesn’t always!). The only advice I can offer is this:

1. practise - treat it like any other fluid medium

2. Do not do the following - after carefully pouring the coffee over the paper so it will stain more in some places than others and deciding it needs a few more minutes before rinsing do not walk into your studio and start doing something else. Two hours later, when you return to the kitchen for a cup of tea and see your paper, now dried and heavily stained, definitely do not take it outside and spray with a 1:1 bleach mix then bleach it too much. After doing this do not dry your paper, think about recycling it because of the extremely unpleasant smell now emanating from it, then think no, I’ll stain it again. Definitely don’t. Because after the third immersion in fluid even the toughest paper is going to become a) porous and b) likely to rot very quickly, thus your finely stippled drawing will have many a dot which bleeds into the paper and it probably won’t last very long.

And it will stink! This is the paper. I wonder how long it will last…

Technical pen on coffee stained paper, 8.5×11.75inches.

I’m not sure why this is a lost thing - well I sort of am, but if I try to analyse it, it all falls apart. As this is a chrysalis and once help a pupa - or baby, I’m also shoehorning this into IF.

My still quite new but long enough to hurt relationship ended last night and I feel shellshocked. There were some issues and in the process of trying to resolve these I discovered something that I knew I absolutely could not accept and I found myself in the horrible position of saying I’m sorry but I can no longer be in a relationship with you. I want so much for this to be different, but it isn’t. The man I was with does have the choice to do something about this, but he chooses not to. I know I’m being a bit cryptic but it would take quite a lot of explaining.

This is, of course, at the root of Lost Thing.

click for a closer look

at long last I’ve taken the plunge and these little guys are the first to strut their stuff in public. I also have some collage materials up. So please go and have a look! I’m getting back into the swing of things now so I’ll be visiting everyone soon - I’m looking forward to seeing what you’ve all been up to.

Natterjack toad Epidalea calamita, European river otter Lutra lutra, English bluebell Hyacinthoides non-scriptathese are a few of the drawings I’ve been doing lately. They’ll be in print soon…

I’ve been doing other things too but nothing I thought was worth sharing.

Hope you are all okay out there in blogland. Life is still very busy with me, and unfortunately dues to CFS I find I start yawning around 9.00pm despite the nap I also take after lunch. It’s amazing to me that I’m not piling on the weight because I’m not able to take much exercise and I’ve given up smoking- but weirdly since I started trying to keep my blood sugar stable I’ve actually been losing weight.

I shall get round to visiting a few blogs soon I hope.

Take care my friends

I was very happy to see today’s IF topic, I was going to post this anyway, but as soon as I saw ‘Seed’ I thought of this quote:

“Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man.”

Very appropriate with the words I had already typed, below. This quote is usually attributed to the Jesuits these days, but originally it seems to have come from Francis Xavier.

In psychotherapy the tendency of some mothers to ‘worship’ their male children simply because they are male is referred to as the Little King syndrome. Little kings  grow up into men with a sense of entltlement, a tendency towards superiority and arrogance and a belief that their female partners should also worship them. Of course there are degrees of ‘kinglyness’, but all such men are unfortunately very wounded - and frequently very angry with women (well, with their mothers, but the feelings tend to get generalised). The wounding and anger derives from the need to carry the weight of the mothers reflection of specialness - in order to be so special the child cannot be himself, an ordinary little boy, instead he is only allowed to behave according to his mother’s definition of specialness. His true self and real feelings are shamed and rejected. The wounding and consequent anger keeps the man himself isolated and unable to experience true intimacy and may also erupt into emotional or physical abuse.

I hadn’t thought about this for a long time, but when I drew this boy it instantly came to mind. Ink & digital colour.

Age may wrinkle the face, but lack of enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.

Proverb

I’m sure IF is chock-a-block with wrinkly faces this week so I thought I’d add mine to the crinkly mix. This is in progress.

I had real trouble linking back from the site. Amongst other things, I kept having my thumbnail rejected, which is why I’m using an old one - then when I finally got it right I think I might have classed this as mixed media, rather than digital. Oh well….

Ink and digital colouring

(If you click on the image you can magnify it for easier reading)

I was tagged by Emma to reveal 7 random or weird things about myself - so here they are!

This is a drawing of me aged five - the only place you will find bows on me now, is the laces in my shoes (BONUS - extra fact revealed!).

I’m tagging the following people:

Darryl

Kerstin

Casey

Ammon

Mim

Juj

Melanie

And all on the understanding that participation is entirely optional - only if you’ll enjoy it.

And now for the serious stuff: please DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK

Two final versions (oh the pleasures of finishing things digitally - several versions can be had in minutes!), think I prefer the one with some of the clothes coloured. I also feel the light blue works much better than the dark. For anyone who’s interested I did a line drawing, then painted the background colours seperately, I then scanned both and superimposed the line drawing over the background. The clothing is collage and just required scanning again and then adding the linework - which took about two minutes by the time I’d done it three times. I have no intention of working entirely digitally but it does open up a whole range of effects I either can’t get, or are really time consuming when done by hand.

I’m sorry these images are so small - I had a spot of trouble re-sizing as I didn’t realise simply converting a photoshop document to a jpg would reduce the file size considerably…