7th March 2018

This isn't as good a drawing as the last one, but the point of doing this isn't to create good pictures, it's to open up a dialogue with the unconscious. Sounds pretentious :-)

This is a drawing of a dream I had recently, where we were galley slaves, and the gangmaster handed out a chocolate bar to every other person. The idea was that you gave half to the person behind you, and so everyone got half a bar of chocolate. I suddenly panicked that the person behind the person behind me might not have got any chocolate, and so I was ready to break my bar into thirds. She reassured me that she had received a bar herself and that the system was working, and so I was relieved.

The person on the left is me, then the man in the foreground on the right is the person I'm giving my half of the bar to, and the other person is the woman who was also given a bar.

8th March 2018

No images arose from my subconscious, so I decided to try and improve my drawing abilities by drawing from life a glass stopper of a bottle. I thought it would be really difficult, but it turned out to be way harder than that. The closer I looked, the more there was to see. I tried to draw everything I could see, but it was a herculean task, and it didn't look much like the actual stopper.

As you can see, I got fed up and stopped half way through. You could say I was a stopper! (hehe).

9th March 2018

Again, my subconscious isn't saying anything to me. Perhaps it's sulking? So I tried to draw the stopper again. The keen eyed will notice that it's not exactly the same stopper, because this one has '12' on it, but the other one had '22', but it's the same design.

Drawing with a biro is unforgiving for these two reasons: 1.) nothing can be undone,  2.) it's difficult to do flat areas of shade, it just looks like lines. Reflected light is best represented as a splodge of white on top of what's already there. You can't do that with biro because that splodge of light is the area that you have to leave completely alone. Since it's always additive, any biro drawing will get darker and darker as time goes on. The only way of making a patch seem lighter is to draw everything else on the page darker. Really difficult not to end up with a completely black page. The thing that prevents this is that it takes ages to colour in a page black with biro so most people give up before getting to the completely black stage. If, as Enoch Powell said, 'all political lives end in failure', then all biro drawings end in failure. That's why my stopper looks like a milk bottle top that needs a good clean.

11th March 2018