Recent Drawings, Trees and some Fantasy

I am really loving working with very basic materials at the moment. I have done quite a few drawings just with charcoal. Some with both black and white pencils on a neutral paper and others on plain white paper with just a hint of colour. I can't resist that touch of bright colour.

This is a giant Moreton Bay Fig Tree that I walk past every day. I spent about a week on this drawing. I don't think I have done anything so detailed for a while. There is a love heart with initials on the branch to the left.

Kangaroos are really a subject I can't seem to leave alone. They keep reappearing in new work when I thought I'd gotten them out of my system with the Terra Australis show last year. I have placed this little guy in front of Brisbane's Story Bridge. Something about the reverse curves got me going compositionally.

This is one of what I call my "fantasy" drawings.  I did quite a bit of sketching when the Brisbane Ekka was on, hence the Ferris wheel and the people on the left. My kangaroo and my Fig Tree are also in there plus Michelangelo's Sybil and a skeleton fleshed out. Don't ask me what this is about. There are orchids in there too.

Another skeleton. This has come no doubt from my concentration on anatomy this year. Glasshouse Mountains in the background, tree, owl, Watteau's Minstrel, all outside a Paddington gate, waiting for the mail.

This is a clump of Jacaranda trees down in my back yard. I haven't done anything like this before and it did take several days. It is a pretty accurate representation of what is there.

Experiments with Pastel - Landscape

I am still continuing to explore the possibilities of the medium of pastel. The colours can become so luminous with the layering effects which makes them ideally suited to the effects of light on the landscape and also clouds.

I am trying something a bit different from my usual subject matter. I drove up to the Glasshouse Mountains as I have always loved those monolithic volcanic rocks towering over the coloured fields. The colours in the landscape were very strong that day reflecting all the rain we have had and the fact that we really are in a semi-tropical area here in Queensland.

My big secret ingredient here is the paper. I used sandpaper! It is about P400 or P600 in sandpaper language. I love the texture and also the black surface. You have a lot of control over tone as you are consciously working from dark to light instead of the usual white to dark. 

These two are different angles of the Glasshouse Mountains. We drove down every back road to get the best vistas.

This one is much closer to home, being the view from my back deck. That is Torbrec on the right. It is really just a cloud study with the new medium.

I should stress that these are just experiments and I do intend to do larger works incorporating these landscapes as backgrounds.

This rabbit is also a shift for me instead of my usual kangaroos. I did him over the Easter weekend which was just a coincidence. He is also source material for some larger ideas.