An invitation to experience my new drawing course for free

I have taught art in real life for over 15 years & ran a pilot version of the Exploring Drawing e-course with a group earlier this year, but this is the first time it has run online as a commercial venture.

I can understand that some of you might be hesitant about signing up. The first e-course that I joined as a participant took me around three months to take the plunge & sign up for it. The May version of the course came and went, and it was not until September that I signed up & paid.

I can appreciate your concerns as this is a new course. With this in mind, I have made the decision to invite you to experience the first two weeks of the course free and without obligation. Of course, I hope that you will then want to continue with the rest of the classes.

Everyone, who then signs up for the course, will be offered the opportunity to exhibit a selection of their work in The Watercolour Journals online gallery. As an added bonus I will be extending the opening of the gallery to cover the holiday & New Year period, so that you can invite your friends & family to view your work there too.

You may have been promising yourself that one day you will give yourself the opportunity to develop your artistic potential. I would like to invite you to take the first step toward that by joining me for the first two weeks (and beyond) of Exploring Drawing.

Please click here to sign up for the course

Best wishes

Erica

P.S. The course begins on the 15th October & this invitation will be open for two weeks. You will still have access to the whole course even if you join after the 15th.

Isadora in progress

I have now begun a larger version of the provisional sketch I made last week. I'm enthusiastic about the qualities that using recycled paper can bring to a piece. As the portraits I make are based on early photographs that are now fairly ancient & weathered paper & card  themselves, this use of paper that has a previous life feels like a perfect match.

This is the first stage of this piece. I now need to leave it in a place in the studio where I will see it when I am not expecting it. I find that this process of allowing work in progress to catch me unawares helps me to see work objectively & decide what needs to happen next. I find that this is a really helpful technique, particularly if I feel I am losing my way with a particular piece.

Have you tried this technique? I'd also be very interested to hear of any others that work for you.

Isadora Duncan - beginning a portrait

I have had little time recently for making art. My real life art teaching at college began last week & I have also been working hard on preparing & launching my new website & e-course.

Today, the heavens opened in Gloucestershire & finally, I had time to retreat into the sanctuary of my studio. I already had plans to continue the series of portraits I had begun making, drawing inspiration from early photographs of creative people & others within their circles. I love this portrait of Isadora Duncan, her beautiful almond shaped eyes & long white neck. My process is always to begin by making a number of preliminary sketches to help me understand the pose, the dimensions of the face & the expression of the subject.

I usually make my preliminary sketches on scrap paper & will often use recycled paper in the finished piece. This drawing was made using a roller ball ink pen.

I then used Conté crayon to add tone & was pleased with the way the dark background lifted the face forward. I'm sure there'll be many more sketches before I move on to making the final piece, but feel that I have begun to become acquainted with Isadora. 

The new website & e-course info can be viewed here. I'd love any feedback on the new site!

Other portraits in this series can be seen by clicking here.

Light & colour in Saint Cézaire, South of France

I have been away from here for a while as I have been in the South of France for a few weeks. I've been relaxing, enjoying the sunshine, absorbing some French culture & inspiration (all of this without internet access!)
One beautiful day, we drove up to the small town of Saint Cézaire. The sun rose high into the sky scorching the roofs, roads & surrounding countryside.

The water bubbled lazily from the fountain in the town square, as we took refuge from the midday sun close by in the shady pizzeria.

Later we visited this brocante, the French equivalent of a flea market. Often these markets take place on a particular day & sprawl through the streets of a town. This brocante was a single shop, but it had still managed to escape out the door & spread itself across the pavement! It offered many strange & wondrous objects for sale, including ancient door handles. We bought two pairs, one brass and, the other, porcelain & for only 10€ each. They are now installed & look perfect in our English Victorian house.

I love the creamy colours against the amazingly, blue sky & the play of the angles of the buildings & the curve of the road.

P.S. I have to admit to feeling rather pleased that I discovered how to type French accents & the Euro symbol on a UK keyboard!

The (almost) finished icon

Saturday was the second part of the icon workshop, tutored by Ian Knowles. As this was only a two day workshop and not long enough to complete an icon from scratch, the face was marked out from a template using red ochre powder. Each person then made the egg tempera paint from egg emulsion & ground pigment. The focus was on rendering the image by building up layers of tone & colour.

Here is the painting of the first few layers that I completed last week:

Below are the subsequent stages as the face began to emerge.

These are the group's finished icons (mine's the one in the centre). I found it fascinating how they all began from the same few inital markings and yet, seemed to have developed their own expressions & individuality.

For anyone who missed it before, here is the link to Ian's website, Elias Icons, where his beautiful work can be seen.

The Holy Face

As a spiritual, rather than a religious person, I approach the subject of icons from an artistic perspective & I am drawn to their beauty. On Saturday, I attended the first part of a two week workshop to paint an icon using egg tempera.

It was the end of an exhausting week at work & I really didn't relish the thought of having to get up on Saturday at the same hour I would during the week - but it was certainly worth the effort.The workshop was tutored by iconographer, Ian Knowles,

In addition to the icons, the other aspect of this course that interested me was that we would be making our own paints. Regular readers of this blog will know that this is something I have tried before & the account of my previous attempts at this can be viewed here. I'm pleased to report that the results were much more successful this time. With support from Ian, we made our own egg tempera, a magical blend of egg, vodka & raw pigment. I have to admit that, for me, the vodka was a surprise ingredient!

Once the paint was mixed, the painting process began.....
Below is the icon so far. It already has 5 layers of tempera on the face, although the background will remain as it is, covered with one layer of variegated wash. The face is built up progressively, working from dark to light - it's fascinating seeing it gradually appear.

I am very excited about Saturday's workshop & shall be out of bed before the alarm this week! I promise to report back with an update.

Please take a look at Ian's exquisite work, which can be viewed at Elias Icons

A very small museum

I have a confession to make, I have a really unappealing habit, I'm trying to control it, but a lot of the time it gets the better of me.

This is my problem- I see things on the ground & have an uncontrollable urge to pick them up...

Sometimes they're beautiful natural objects, leaf skeletons, a soft shaped piece of turquoise glass smoothed by the ocean or a newly escaped polished conker.  Occasionally, the 'treasures' are not what they first appear & are hastily dropped to the ground again. My pockets are full of these impulse acquisitions, which often crumble to nothing before reaching my studio. For those that do survive the hazardous journey, superior accommodation awaits.

After a visit to the Natural History Museum in Oxford, I had this idea that I wanted to have a museum of my very own. My other favourite museum in Oxford is the Pitt Rivers Museum. One of the reasons that I love it so much is the eccentric classification system; exhibits are grouped by type, rather than the usual way, by geographical or cultural area

However, my museum is much smaller, being housed in a couple of glass lidded tea boxes that I purchased specially for this purpose. I have, however, contrived my own classification system.

The Pitt Rivers Museum has heavy drawers that can be pulled open by their brass handles to reveal hidden treasures. Some of these items are not that pleasant; I am thinking here of the 'sympathic magic' section. One item is a bull's heart, pierced with iron nails & found in a chimney in the New Forest, Dorset. None of my treasures are, thankfully, quite as nasty as that.

What links these objects, that they are similar shapes, natural objects or similar colours? I think it's nearly all of these things and yet, not quite any of them. 

I have lined the compartments with scrunched up tissue paper & plan to make a label for each, written in scratchy handwriting, detailing the contents.

List of contents left to right.

Top row: Bees extracted from the dining room chimney which contained a nest, coral gifted by an elderly relative, an unindentified fruit (collected from a path in a French forest)

Middle row: Ammonite bought from Natural History museum, Oxford, devil's toenail I dug up in my garden, black beetle, honey bee & section of exquisitely coloured butterfly wing

Bottom row: Owl feather (down) found on a walk by the river Severn,  piece of broken pink pressed glass dessert bowl (echoing the shape of the ammonite), foil wrapper that once held a chocolate ammonite, which my daughter gave me as a present from Lyme Regis.

N.B. No creatures were harmed in the assemblage of this museum

*** Click here to try the first two weeks of my online drawing course for free ***