This guy should be famous!

Buckaroo

Moving away from the subject of sketching for just a moment, this is what the interweb was made for. Classic!

We now return you to normal service.

I've not posted much in the way of colour to this blog yet, so here's a pastel sketch that I made a while back of the church where my wife and I married. I'd like to be able to claim that I sat out in the beautiful English countryside on a glorious Summer's day in order to sketch this, but alas the truth is far less idealistic: I sketched this from a photograph of the church we have on our wall. Still, I was pleased with the result.

This is my sketch for last week's Illustration Friday theme: Alone. Unfortunately I was too late to enter it to the website, but I thought I'd post it here anyway. I thought I'd post it, not because I think it's a great example of artwork (far from it -- it only took a couple of minutes, and I may have several more goes yet), but because I was pleased with the concept. "Alone" always conjurs up such negative feelings, and I was originally going to have my faceless alone person looking pleadingly towards the "in crowd". Then I thought about how much there can be to celebrate about being alone, and made him rejoice instead. Alone at last! How many of us have felt that before?

Illustration Friday!

I've discovered a great website called Illustration Friday!. Every Friday, you're given (either by email or just by visiting the site) a topic on which to draw something. It doesn't matter how well you draw, or how ambitious the drawing is, the point is just to do something. You can then publish your picture and tell the website about it, and they'll add a link to it.

Last week's theme was "Alone" (about which more in the next entry), and this week's theme is "Reinvent".

Here's a montage I made while on holiday last summer. We were on the banks of Ullswater in the Lake District. It was a warm, greyish day. The girls played on the rocks, looking for fish, and my wife combed the shore, looking for inspiration in the rocks for her ceramics, while I sat by the shore and sketched what I saw. The yacht was just moving away from the shore, hence the two views (and yes, it was called Skywalker). The walking boot was my daughters, one she left by me while she went wading. And the silhouette is of my eldest daughter as she balanced on the rocks looking for fish. Of the four items in the montage, that was the trickiest to capture because it was the fastest moving!

Featured on Moleskinerie

Got featured on Moleskinerie yesterday and my hit count has shot up! Thanks everyone who takes the trouble to click through to here, and I hope you like it enough to visit again!

a million monkeys typing � Keeping It Personal

Douglas Johnston's ever-interesting "a million monkeys typing" blog has a fascinating article at the moment called Keeping It Personal, which lays down his ideas for integrating personal items, such as doodles, sketches, journal entries, and so forth, into your daily planning system in order to build a more personal bond with your planner and help build what David Allen calls a "trusted system". This is different to the system I use (journal in a Moleskine, planning on a Palm) in ways which, frankly, worry me, because I love my Moleskine and, at the moment, I resent and distrust my Palm, and find it more inconvenient than convenient. I think Doug has an excellent point, but I shudder at the thought of changing my system in such a drastic way.

I've been meaning to post a page from my Moleskine for a while now. The trouble is, with it being a personal journal, most double page spreads contain at least something I'd rather not publish! This one from about six weeks ago is pretty general though, and contains a few doodles as well, which makes it a bit more interesting.

Thought for the day

D O G S H A V E O W N E R S
C A T S H A V E S T A F F

A family outing for Bank Holiday Monday last weekend, and we took our first trip to the Imperial War Museum at Duxford. I've only lived in this area now for 14 years, so it was probably time to go. Anyway, I managed to grab 5 minutes on my own with a cup of tea while the rest of the family caught up with me, and I managed to make a quick sketch of the plane that was nearest to me: a Dassault Mystere. It's not often I sketch something like this, so I was quite pleased, especially as it was positioned at a slightly unusual angle.

I haven't had the chance to put anything up in the last few days, so here's a couple of old old sketches. Not particularly interesting or good, but quite fun: sketches of a couple of old Pooh toys that my kids got from a cereal packet or something. First up, Eeeyore ...

... and finally, Piglet. Note the pencil guides in these ink sketches. I told you they were old. You wouldn't catch me doing that any more. Actually, now that I think about it, there is one interesting feature about these sketches: they were the first ones I did when I started sketching "seriously" again (a couple of years ago) for the first time since my teens.