Spanish sketchbook

I have spent the last 2 weeks eating and drawing and swimming and lying in the sun in Southern Spain. It was glorious. Here are doodles…

Things I would especially recommend…

• Visiting the Alhambra, as much as possible and at all times of day, but especially the Nasrid Palaces at night – I felt as though I had stumbled into a fairy story.
• Eating churros and chocolate until you can’t stand up.
• Walking around the Real Monasterio de San Jeronimo in Granada, where nuns have painted the inside of the chapel. All over. In a sort of glorious and slightly terrifying choas – corpulent cherubs and impressionistic pastoral scenes and multicoloured Moorish-inspired patterns and trompe l’oiel monochrome work and simulated marble textures in the style of bad 1980s DIY magazines and actual beautiful ancient marble and carved wood and hideous Catholic statues and beautiful sinuous elegant arches and stained glass windows and a towering eyeful of gold leaf, all crammed in together. Prepare for visual hangover.
• Being stunned by the caves at Nerja, which are huge and surreal and magic.
• Eating cane honey in Frigiliana.
• the Picasso museum in Malaga – joyous.

hair

I seem to have a bit of a visual obsession with hair (see here, and here, and here, and here!). Here’s some more of it…

(you can also see a woman with wings who may or may not be a harpy, and that on the brown paper is an ink-and-watercolour sketch I did of a ceramic figure by the brilliant Linda Kieft. Go and look at her work. It is stunning.)

Here is even more more of it in other people’s work…

Above: Seesaw by Eveline Tarunadjaja. Below: hair, dogs and knitting, all at once, marvellous – from Julie Morstad. Below that: gorgeousness from Catherine Campbell.

While we’re on the subject, this poem by Cathy Song is beautiful too. This bit:-

My hair, freshly washed   

like a measure of wealth,   

like a bridal veil.

(my hair was waist length from the age of about 6 until I had it all hacked off 2 years ago. I loved the feeling of light-headedness, and how quickly it dried after impromptu river-swims on long walks, and it does look lovely short. But I’m growing it all out again, unbearably slowly. I miss the slippery rush of unpinning it at the end of the day, and the feeling of wealth that the poem talks about. Which is an odd feeling to get from a weight of dead tissue, isn’t it?)

knitting and things…

I’m not doing terribly well with posts of late – I’m almost entirely wrapped up in a secret project that can’t be blogged.

There is some knitting and some sewing though; both bits of clothing for myself. Here is the most recent evidence of The Knitting Habit (the pattern is free, here. The yarn is Rowan creative focus worsted)…

…and here is a frock I’ve made myself for summer:-

stitches, swatches and wonky geometry

I’ve been making patchwork today, by hand, like our great-grandmas did it. I am in awe of them, to be honest. Needle-poked iron-singed cramped-up fingers, and a head full of frustration because it it So Slow. There is such satisfaction in the obsessive laborious things though; why is that?

Anyway, there are no photos because the camera has temporarily died, but here are some pretty things…

Top to bottom, they are

• beautiful patchworky drawings by Catherine Campbell (who is, by the way, one of my favourite illustrators)
• loud, brash, cheerful cotton print by Blue Hill fabrics
• quirky, chintzy, girly cotton print by Moda

happy wednesday

Today I got tickets to see Radiohead. Later today the insurance company replaced our stolen laptop that we thought we weren’t going to be able to claim for. I have spent the entire day crawling around making stop-motion animations with college students and being paid for the pleasure. It is a good, good day.

In honour of my life’s-looking-up mood, here is a lovely illustration by the marvellous Rob Ryan.

 

sliced white

I am really enjoying scalpel-drawing at the moment. Here is a birthday card…

blue whales

I am doing research for a children’s story I’m illustrating and in which, amongst other things, a duck sees a blue whale and is amazed. I’m pretty amazed myself. Did you know that blue whales are the biggest mammals to have EVER EXISTED on the earth?! Wow. Here is some scrawl.

I like this.

I especially like the painted camouflage, and the baa baa black sheep sounding bit at the beginning.

the room was suddenly rich…

Yesterday we woke up on a friend’s floor in a room at the top of a big warm house down a narrow lane in the middle of nowhere. The sky was white and the land was covered in snow – bare trees and crows startling black against it – everything monochrome and quiet and beautiful.

We took our hangovers outside and built snow-folk in the yard, laughed a lot, got very cold, and then came inside and ate a huge fry-up with big mugs of tea. Blooming marvellous. (There is a childish joy in building a snowman So Big You Need A Ladder To Do The Face!)

Pictures courtesy of Gina Brookes. Snow building/sculpting/chucking/whacking with a billhook by me, beardy Joe of Fallen Leaf, gorgeous Gina, Jason Jones and Kingman Cheng. 

Oh yes, and read this poem. It is glorious.

small pleasures…

(The book this doodle is in is my diary this year – it’s a gorgeous wee thing called one year of white pages made by NAVA design. You could get hold of your own here, but I bought mine in Utility and it was much cheaper than anything I can find online. I’m beginning to wish I’d bought myself a few years’ supply!)