Check the end of this post for info about the swatch-swop. I also have the winner of the December give-away and will make the announcement when they have chosen their prize.
Izzy and Hattie are going to start a painting of their house. I fetched the girls from school and we set up with a little bench each, to rest the board on and a cushion to sit on.They were excited about going to their own house secretly instead of going to my house.
I made bamboo pens to draw with and got waterproof Indian ink, stretched some watercolour paper on boards and tea-washed the paper. (There wasn’t time for them to help with this preparation.)
We had juice and biscuits and I dressed them in Dave’s T-shirts and their chef aprons to keep their clothes clean. They were excited about going to their own house secretly without their Mummy knowing, and being locked out! Their father was forewarned in case he came home.
No preliminary pencil drawings – just straight into the deep water! Talking of water – they wanted to wash their hands and I’d forgotten where the outside tap was. Hattie said that rose petals contain lots of water, so they washed their hands in rose petals. They looked so sweet in their over-large shirts and chef aprons, industriously washing their hands in all the fallen white rose petals. Richard came home unexpectedly and was told to move away from the front door so that they didn’t have to draw him too!
Hattie is very careful and concerned about smudging so she turned her board upside down to do the roof. But the TV aerials were “reflected” so that when she turned it back the chimney was on the left instead of the right. She is also quite quick to wail “I have ruined my picture” and needs reassurance.
Izzy draws quickly and confidently, (sometimes too quickly), happy to get a general impression of bricks, plants and bushes. After a while she got tired of doing the fiddly brickwork. She is quite flexible about ink runnels and spills and observes well, drawing accurately.
Fingers became quite inky and black. We were tired and decided to finish off another day.
It was another two weeks before we could get on with these; finishing the ink drawing and adding colour.
Swatch-Swop: Don’t forget the swatch swop! I need to know that you are taking part by 5th January and I need the swatches by the 15th January. All the instructions can be found by doing “search” top right hand corner and typing in ‘swatch-swop’. (note spelling and hyphen) You do one colour range and make 6 sets of swatches and get a different set of 6 back in return.
n).
Leave a Reply