It's been a while since I've posted some Window Work. There's a very good reason for that – I went completely off the boil. I did catch myself up a couple of months ago, though, and have since hauled myself back to a reasonable standard of rapid drawing.
There's a lot more engagement with this batch – it always helps when the folk innocently walking down the street have something notable about them. In this case I was lucky to get a few folk with interesting attitudes – the shivery girl on the left, the heaving mother next to her, and the self-absorbed bloke with his phone. The cyclist was done the fastest, and I think the drawing conveys that energy. The disembodied arm is included because I think it's quite a good drawing of that particular arm – no more, no less.
As ever I've stuck to my Paynes Grey watercolour, 100gm A4 copy paper, but I've come back – via various Oriental brushes, cheap synthetics, and pricey sables – to the Pentel Aquash water brush (broad). I originally bought them for their portability, but I love the quality of the hair. It's very resilient nylon – springy, and nicely responsive. The one I'm using just now has a very fine point indeed, but can still store a useful enough amount of paint. They are designed to hold a reservoir of water or wash in the handle, but I don't utilise that feature – except to put a bit of weight into the brush.
I started by saying that I'd gone off the boil with the Window Works series. It's difficult to know for certain why that was. Over the last couple of years I often went a week or so before forcing myself to sit at the window, and when I did make myself draw the results were dreadful. It's certainly true that my encroaching physical wear and tear didn't help, but then (and whisper it...) boredom may have played a part – a very hard thing to admit. I hope that that very negative phase is passing - after all, I've been doing these in one form or another on and off for fifty years (where I had a street window), and since returning seriously to the window work nearly twenty years ago I've logged over a thousand A4 sheets. I think I should maybe forgive myself the odd lapse now and then.
Anyway, back on track for now, and I wonder whether it could be possible that my daily physiotherapy may be having a positive effect on more than just my worn back and cartilage-lite knees?
It is, though, very annoying indeed to have to clear the eye-brain-hand pathway and build up the drawing muscle. Yet again.
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