Not my usual style but I do this every Christmas. I sit down before an array of coloured wools and "paint" with them until a Christmas stocking has made itself for this year's recipient. I make it up as I go along. We were so happy to have my Mother, Betty, with us on Christmas Day this year but I took this to the wire with the stocking finished at 2.30 in the morning and just hanging in time for Santa's boots to be almost visible descending the chimney. Most enjoyable.
My small daughter, sketched while she was asleep in 1997, aged about three months. She was not a beautiful baby and had a blotchy face but was none the less an absorbing subject whether I was drawing her or not.
Here's a drawing I made last time I went to SKVA in Rotterdam - very free and I got the ink to keep its flow by occasionally dipping my pen in the water (n.b. I love ink;I hate pens!) and started it off by shaking a few blots onto the page, one of which became his right nipple, albeit a a millimetre or so too low. 
The last and smudgiest of these monoprints. I think this was a very fast one. It is always interesting afterwards to find what I chose and notated from the scene in front of me. In this one the model becomes integrated with the foliage and objects behind her, and, as she leans towards me I just have time to note the back of her hand and the corrugated knuckles before the line falls away with the curve of her lower leg... and time's up.
Nearly the last of this series .........(monoprints, 30 x 30, 2008) tomorrow one last smudgy little one and then, since I am preparing an exhibition next month in the Goethe Institute in Rottterdam, who knows what strange miscellany all my sifting through and choosing will produce..
Two more from the monoprint series I am serialising. I love the accidental smudgy effects that are a by-product of this medium. Remember the actual drawing is on the back - a clean, 5b pencil drawing in a reverse image... I always prefer the print. Last examples tomorrow...
Just a couple of purely linear accounts of one-minute model poses... made a few weeks ago. Don't I make it look easy? Just try it... and these are far from perfect.
Sometimes, with models I know well, I really capture a likeness. It's not a portrait and getting a likeness is not the objective but it is quite satisfying when it happens. With this model on this occasion I was feeling her in a linear way. I was having some fun with the foliage in the background - I often feel the need for a context - even a narrative - though not always - as you will see tomorrow.
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