1. a picture or diagram made with a pencil, pen, or crayon rather than paint.
“a series of charcoal drawings on white paper”
synonyms: sketch, picture, illustration, representation, portrayal, delineation, depiction, composition, study, diagram, outline, design, plan, artist’s impression; tracing
“he did a pencil drawing of the house”
2. an instance of selecting the winner or winners in a lottery or raffle.
“entrants need not be present at the drawing”
“Selected double-page spreads from Adriaen Coenen’s Visboek (Fish Book), an epic 800+ page tome on all things fish and fish-related. Coenen began work on this unique book in 1577, at the age of 63, and in three years gathered an unprecedented amount of information on the sea and its coasts, coastal waters, fishing grounds and marine animals. The information was largely gathered in the course of Coenen’s daily work in the Dutch sea-side village of Scheveningen as a fisherman and fish auctioneer and, later on, as wreck master of Holland (allowing him access to every strange creature that washed ashore). Coenen was also a well respected authority in academic circles and used this reputation to receive learned works on the sea from The Hague and Leiden, copied extracts from which find their way into his Fish Book.”
I thought I would start posting these sketched here directly, as well as on Instagram. It gives me more free reign to add rambling thoughts afterwards.
75/365
Drawn without looking. I went in quite hard with the snapseed as you can tell.
..and to add insult to injury two of these I have already posted here. But in the spirit of complete-ism and putting everything down this blog pipe, here we are.
Notebooks Zebulon (9 x 14 pocket Moleskine) and Leonidas (8 x 11 homemade pocket book) are now retired (so you can see I do continue to use them, it’s just most of the content is not suitable for posting in the internet (and I mean that in a nice way)). Ethel (13 x 21 Moleskine) is still going strong, and is what I am mainly using for writing, mapping, drawing, general ranting and work. I also have a new shiny currently un-named homemade pocket book. I’m sticking with just the two for now, as I’m currently liking seeing the consistency and flow in build up in Ethel, and I obviously need a smaller pocket book that I can be a Everyday Carry type object for emergencies.
(above from a week or so ago) Notebook Zebulon is close to the end. But there are a few corners not filled with indecipherable tiny writing.
A few items are coming to a head, at BDH one large project at work is being broadcast at the moment and the Very Large Animation job we did earlier in the year is on the brink. Also a small personal piece to be published in a new and very exiting way with other stuff that’s much better than mine. The “things planned” part are art things (as opposed to wok things) that I hope to post about here as I progress through them. That involves removing a few shackles of hesitancy on my part. Not to mention my bionically slow progress. But one can only try.
What? Oh, yes sketches, they get pushed to the back of the queue on a daily basis, then I feel bad. But I have to keep reminding myself, NOBODY CARES, so it’s ok. Might also start playing with posting them straight here and pinging them out then putting them on Instagram, instead of the other way around.
69/365. Elaboration on guitar under the desk started in 61/365. It does get played, btw. Multi-coloured biro. Notebook: Ethel
70/365 Various horizon lines drawn from the window of the 11:30 to London Paddington. Going through Bath Spa, Chippenham, Swindon, Didcot Parkway. V-ball. Notebook: Ethel.
71/365 Back-ends of various vehicles drawn during mildly epic road trip (when stationary and when it was safe to do so, obv) from Hunstanton through Peterborough, A47, M6, M5 etc. 7 hours journey time in total. See images of both #east and #west seas (taken on same day) earlier in this feed. V-ball. Notebook: Ethel.
72/365 Hot air balloon that just flew low over our town at speed. They take off from Ashton Court which is about 9 miles away so they seem to have got the pace without the altitude. We could see the shape of the flames from the burners very cleary. I have friends who have seen balloons so low over Bristol they have had conversations with the occupants. Pencil. Without looking. Notebook: Ethel
73/364 Heads of moving horses, drawn without looking. Straight to V-ball. Notebook: Ethel
“Sidereus Nuncius (usually Sidereal Messenger, also Starry Messenger or Sidereal Message) is a short astronomical treatise (or pamphlet) published in New Latin by Galileo Galilei on March 13, 1610.[1] It was the first published scientific work based on observations made through a telescope, and it contains the results of Galileo’s early observations of the imperfect and mountainous Moon, the hundreds of stars that were unable to be seen in either the Milky Way or certain constellations with the naked eye, and the Medicean Stars that appeared to be circling Jupiter.”
A week or so ago I travelled across England to pick up a car. So the away journey was by train and the return by car.
There’s a lot of enforced down time during a trip like that so I took a few photos made a few drawings, read a bit of Vonnegut, thought about stuff. Very enriching in all.
I liked the idea I could sample the sea on opposite coasts in one day. This was not possible on the way there as I was effectively on food and couldn’t get to Clevedon.
So my morning photo of the West that day was this one:
Caught the 11:05 to Paddington, with the express idea of drawing, a possibly trying to catch up on the 365 drawing thing I’ve been going. Not sure if you have tried drawing on a train, most people are too close for you to study without causing a uncomfortable situation and generally stuff is going passed so quickly outside you need a super fast photographic memory to get it in your brain before you can decide how to represent it on the page.
So I decided to go for the horizon, because that goes pass slower and if you miss a bit it doesn’t look too weird if you just join on to the contiuation.
I added the times and locations at points, also a few announcements from the guard to add some
ambience
.
70/365 Various horizon lines drawn from the window of the 11:30 to London Paddington. Going through Bath Spa, Chippenham, Swindon, Didcot Parkway. V-ball. Notebook: Ethel.
I got as far as Didcot Parkway on that then got the I’ll-miss-my-stop-fear, even theough the train was terminating. The connections were really tight as I got a super cheap ticket I had to make everyone.
Managed to take a picture of Yea Olde Saint Pancras as I got to Kings Cross.
Passing through the London at speed. Not even touching the sides. St. Pancras from the entrance to Kings Cross. #dontforgettolookupView across Shaw’s Dike.
Then there I was in the East. It’s quite flat there. We picked up the car somewhere in the middle of the Fens, this is what it is like there.
Mostly sky.
I stayed over night at my folks place. There’s a lot of amazing old photos there. They should write a book.
Here is a picture of my Grandad at a Grasstrack meeting at Bourne in June 1949, less that 4 years after the end of the Second World War. Two Soldiers looking on. (Grandad’s on the left):
Picture of Grandad (on the left) with fellow rider at a grass track meet. Taken at Bourne, June 1949. Check out the two military looking fellas in the back there.
So the next day I set off as early as I could (which wasn’t that early), this time because I had wheels I could take a picture of the sea, here known as the Wash. It’s quite shallow there so the sea is often very flat compared to the ocean that crashes in on the West coast.
The Wash from near the Light House, Old Hunstanton.
Wanted to draw on the way back too. But you can’t draw when driving. That is bad. So I took breaks (7 hour drive altogether), and when I took a break I drew the backend of whatever I could see.
71/365 Back-ends of various vehicles drawn during mildly epic road trip (when stationary and when it was safe to do so, obv) from Hunstanton through Peterborough, A47, M6, M5 etc. 7 hours journey time in total. See images of both #east and #west seas (taken on same day) earlier in this feed. V-ball. Notebook: Ethel.
I got caught in a nasty jam on the M62 so didn’t get back home until late. But just in time to catch the end of the light in this picture of the opposite Sea.
The building work began this week and the many weeks of hard work clearing the garage and the existing extension ready for demolition payed off as we put the last box of random items that didn’t fit anywhere else into the car minutes before the demolition of part of the house began.
I’m not sure what our ratio for reduction was, we had some storage space, we sold a lot, assimilated various bits into the rest of the house and into the shed, but there was a lot that we had to lose.
It was very much a loaded process for us as each item seemed to hold another branching tree of memories. One example being a cardboard box which we had been keeping some paper work in, once cleared I picked it up ready to dismatle it for recycling, only to read the label and find it was the box that delivered the toys for my eldest’s first birthday, many years ago.
Notes from lost loved ones, postcards from the other sides, keep sakes from when we had time to keep stuff.
Some of the most difficult things to go through were artwork of various kinds. Especially the children’s, we have three so there were large quantities which we had to reduce or else we would not have had any room to live.
Then there was our own artwork, a constant stream of surprises, as we discovered forgotten box after forgotten portfolio. We tried a loss rate of 2:1 (thus keeping about a third of what we had).
So I was quite pleased with myself when I managed to reduce a very large plastic container of art, comics, notebooks, animation drawings into this suitcase.
It’s nice to lose some of the lazy stuff I could see in there, you could easily tell if a hand was drawn from looking properly or just drawing an approximation of a hand preprogrammed in.
I’m reasonably pleased with what is left.
I suppose I ought to digitize some of this stuff and put it on the site here. If it stands up.
Speaking of standing up, the garage this picture was takenin just a few days ago isn’t anymore.
I suppose I’ve lost the “everyday” part of this project, but, you know life’s too short to get stressed about these things. The point is I am having a lovely time drawing stuff from (mostly) life, my sense of perception and observation has developed and sharpened, my skill with the various implements I am using has improved.
So I am going to keep going with it, even though I am breaking the rules somewhat (there are no rules).
Something that seems to be happening also is sometimes I will finish a drawing and think it’s not great but it gets just as much feedback across the networks as the others.
At the moment I have them automatically cross posting to Twitter and Tumblr. Still haven’t quite got the guts to fire them off to Facebook as well. Not sure why that is, I have always struggled with Facebook, and hate the idea of oversharing on there. But for Tumblr and Twitter I’ll overshare with no worries, which is odd because people who I am connected to on Facebook are more likely to be people I know “Away From Keyboard” as it were.
Anyway, as ever these are embeds from Instagram, you can follow me there if you want them straight off the page, if you catch my drift. I have posted the accompanying comment I posted it with, but you’ll have to click through if you want to read what other people have said. (Don’t bother if there’s only one though that’s usually me adding hashtags after the fact).
Paul Greer 