Little bits and pieces

I've hardly posted anything lately -- I feel bad about it. I've been trying to get on with some bits and pieces to 'keep my hand in' after I finished my big clown painting. I'm still keen on the idea of 'taking' people from old photos and postcards. I've done a few sketches.

Then I did a very small painting for a friend -- small at her request. It's really hard to photograph, maybe because of the black background.

I'm also getting to grips with my Brooklyn Sketchbook Project sketchbook, which is about remembering my mum (who is unfortunately very unwell with Alzheimer's). I don't want to say too much about it when I've done so little of it but this is the cover, which is very simple.

Today I've been doing some hand lettering for a spread that is about all the things my mum used to love to do. When she met new people she would announce that she was an 'artist-writer-director', or some other combination of her skills, so this set of words has particular resonance for me.

Well, that's about it. This was just to say ... I'm still here -- and really enjoying everybody else's blogs.

Sketchbook pages

I record some pages of my current sketchbook here -- a kind of public humiliation record of what I've been doing, so that I can compare it to what I do from here on. 
     With this sketchbook, I decided that it was better to do something than to do nothing, and so to go easy on myself if all that 'came' was collage or a drawing based on a photograph. This is fine, to get yourself going, but you need to evolve. I think it would be good to go deeper into a single idea or theme, developing and exploring it, rather than skipping about the whole time. Good intentions.

The 'themes' of this sketchbook seem to be babies and birds, unintentionally. The penultimate spread is the result of a challenge to myself, while spending the night in a hotel in Stratford-on-Avon, to do a collage using brochures from the hotel lobby. I like the images better seen like this!