More Fish

The Price of Fish: 183 Pale Blue; oil on canvas, 50cm x 60cm.

On The Other Hand

I finished this yesterday, and disliked it a lot.  Re-drew Mitchum's face in a different pose today, and it's better, although for a while he looked like he was listening sincerely under a slogan saying "We're real lawyers."

It's... blaah, I dunno. It's done, and it's better than it was yesterday. Still looks too much like someone who looks like Robert Mitchum. Good left eye, though. I like that at least.

You want me to tell you the little story of right hand left hand?

It is, of course, Night of the Hunter.

The Freaks Said, 'Man, Those Cats Can Really Swing.'

Today I set myself the task of drawing twenty-five cats. Then I realised five rows of five squares would not be a rectangular image. Here they are, then: twenty cats.

20 Cats

Twenty cats, bigger.

Rust

Back to the joys of rust and weathered paint.

The Price of Fish: BK Black & Green, oil on canvas, 50cm x 60cm.

 

Nauty But Nice

Following on from the previous post, I developed the pencil drawing of the space bear and turned him into a linocut.

I've only done one linocut before and it... well, it was a first attempt. The Ursunaut has turned out better, although it needs another pass with the cutter to remove some of the extraneous inking - mainly on the face and the background. I quite like some of the other accidental lines that turned up on the helmet and around the lettering.

 

 The lino, and some preparatory compositional doodles. I very carefully drew out the image and transferred it to the lino in reverse, and then blithely wrote 'URSUNAUT' the right (i.e. the wrong) way round, so I had to write it in again, backwards, over the top of the black marker in white conte pencil so I could see it.

It's an odd, sluggish sort of material to work with, but I quite liked the sense of everything being under control that gave me. Also, a top tip I picked up from somewhere - lie the lino in warm water now and again. Much easier to cut.

The Great Bear

A quick 2B pencil sketch. Russian Bear. A cosmobear. Or an ursunaut.

(I just finished reading Deborah Cadbury's 'Space Race.' Dubious morality abounds, but also undeniable bravery. There's something about space that makes me ten years old again.)

It Used to Go Like That... Now It Goes Like This.

Professor Stone arrives at the office.

In 2009 it looked like this;

 

Now it looks like this;

Not very accurate in terms of delineation of departmental boundaries; Assyriology, Egyptology and Biology apparently in the same room.