"sleeping with a princess"

"sleeping with a princess"

A spare couple of hours and a  new little collection of mixed media drawings, when I should have been working on more "serious" projects. 

"according to custom"

But I can't help myself. Like food for my head.

"like anger"

"moving shadows"

 These roughly A5 sized drawings use mainly a range of collage, linseed oil, wax, turmeric, china graph, graphite, ink and gesso. Some tasty ingredients that smell good too.

"peace for me"

"woman on the platform"

cover for loose drawings

Just a neat little cover to keep them together. You can see it was quite a restless night as usual. 
Enough for a little snack. Enjoy!

"notes - an anonymous discourse"

cover of "notes- an anonymous discourse"

It always feels good to add another little book of drawings in your own handmade little book to the collection and share a few of the pages with you.

new "traces"

Last year I bought a little handmade book from Trace Willans. I have posted some of her work before particularly the collaborative pieces we have done together. It was "empty" except for traces of marks, stains and wax. These previous presences from another artist became the source of my drawings. It is bound using coptic binding and stained strips of  calico. 

I have had this book I've called "Traces", for many months without doing anything with it until recently. Most of the staining which Trace uses is xanthorhea resin which leaves a lovely warm brown, earthy mark. I have stained some paper for bookmaking with it recently and discovered that it keeps getting a bit darker as it is exposed to light. Since these marks are all inside the book on nice thick 200gsm stonehenge paper, they make a great start to focus my drawings around. I used a variety of mixed media including pencil, ink, wax, gouache, pastel, water soluble crayons, charcoal and collage. I was on holidays in Lennox Heads, northern NSW and think the drawings were influenced by the harsh, dry feel of the native scrub in the area. 

As there are many more drawings to "Traces" I will put them up on my website when I get a chance if you are interested.

re-sin

It is always exciting when you complete something quite different to anything you've ever done before. Particularly when you had no idea where to start or even which materials would work. I find this sort of aesthetic problem solving works best if approached slowly and done little by little over an extended period to let ideas infuse from the pages.

I have just recently "finished" this little book made by Trace Willans of papers,wax and resins. In this different collaboration, Trace sends me the "blank" book , which has juicy pages stained with natural materials and waxed in abstract surfaces and I interact with the pages with a variety of materials.

To give you some idea of the scale, this little book is only 6.5 x 8 cms closed. I hope you enjoy some of the images inside.

You might also like:

plaster book collaboration

a different collaboration

drawings

A small series of drawings I've just done while making little books.Reasonably happy with the drawings but the book was pretty ordinary.

Must try harder to finding other formats, covers and fasteners which work better.

small developments

blue forest

Just a few small developments at home away from the immediate stimulus of the SW coast and forests of Western Australia. It could be quite a while, if ever, before I translate these images into larger works. I just might even need to go back there for a reminder of what a beautiful part of the world this is with so much more to explore.

gloucester tree

burnt 

new bark

yallingup forest

bush grid

These little works are in this years "to develop even further" diary but I will post some of the other diaries meanwhile once I scan a small selection again.