Peckham Print Studio Field Trip

Climbing Trees at the Horniman Museum

Continuing my intermittent flirtation with screen printing, I joined Peckham Print Studio's Field Trip to the Horniman Museum & Gardens towards the end of last year. My resulting two colour screen print is above.

The Horniman is a fantastic local museum that was opened in 1901 by a Victorian collector and, in the spirit of the age, it's crammed full of fascinating and exotic stuff; including natural history, African and musical instrument collections.

The Horniman Museum

The trip was led by Tom Murphy, an artist and fastidious screen printer, and consisted of one day of drawing at the museum and another day of printing at the studio. On day one we started out in the Natural History gallery, moved on to the African gallery, then the Music gallery and ended with a bit of sketching outside. Below are some of my sketches. They are all done with india ink in a Pentel Aquash brush pen on tracing paper.

Baboon and skeleton

Spectacled Caiman

Tree climbing mammals

Two tree shrews

Gold figure of an African hunting dog

Various figures and skulls

A case of horn instruments

  

Tom having a sketch in the gardens

On day two the group worked on producing a 2 colour A4 print each, back at the print studio. We were very thoroughly guided through the whole process by Tom, and as I only vaguely remembered what to do it was very helpful. We chose a composition from what was produced the day before and then exposed the tracing paper drawings directly onto a screen.

Exposing my drawings onto a screen

My exposed screen

A fellow field tripper preparing her print

Just the black layer

I chose the case of tree climbers and the horn assemblage to overlay in black and gold. It looks like an almost claustrophobic layering of slightly random stuff that - I think - represents the museum quite well. I'd highly recommend a visit and, if you're interested in joining a Field Trip, keep an eye on Peckham Print Studio's Twitter account.

My final print with black and gold layers

The view from the Horniman Gardens

Sketching at the British Museum

Sketch in progress

I recently had a lovely afternoon sketching at the British Museum. Working from home as I do, I thought it would be good to get out of the house and just draw stuff. After eating my packed lunch in the Great Court I went down to the Africa gallery. I've never actually been in there before and I thought it would be a fitting warm-up for my upcoming trip to Cape Town. I'm travelling there soon for a 2 month working holiday/sabbatical, and I wonder how much of this stuff I will find in the museums there...

Various African masks

I made the decision to sketch with pen only - I used my Preppy 0.3 fountain pen loaded with brown Rotring ink - and just went for it. Admittedly me 'going for it' is everybody else's 'super slow-mo' and I spent my entire time in just one room.

This guy (above) is kind of in the corner of the room i was in, and even though it's massive (you could probably fit 3 people inside it in a very cosy manner) it's very plain and initially looks just like a giant basket. He is in fact an Eland, which is a hefty kind of South African antelope, and as soon as I identified his little head and tail I knew I had to draw him.

I took a few photo pictures while I was there too...

Bronze panel from Benin #junglelife

House pole from British Columbia in the Great Court

Chuck every pattern at a ceiling = British Museum entrance hall

Night night British Museum!

Nicki Minaj in colour

This is just an experiment for my sketchbook portrait, using Dr Martens liquid watercolours (because they're hyper bright) and oil based pitt pencil (because it's proper black). I think it worked.

I drew Nicki Minaj from a picture in an old issue of Wonderland. Once I start drawing, it often amazes me how crazy celebrities faces are and Nicki's is just about as nuts as she is. 

I often instagram things-in-progress, so follow if you're interested in seeing that kind of stuff I'm @abihey - FOLLOW!

One Thousand And One Nights

I found myself with power yesterday.  EDF installed a new electricity meter and all my plug points just stopped working.  We were abruptly thrown into chaos, and the thing we were most concerned about was not the fact that the fridge can't cool, or that there's no hot water, it was that the internet stopped.  

I took it as a chance to put off some of my lesser-relished promotional-type tasks and just sit down and draw instead.  Perhaps it was to vent frustration, but I chose this grizzly scene from 'One Thouand and One Nights' by Hanan Al-Shaykh.  King Shahrayar finds out that his wife and his ten concubines have been cheating on him and so he metes out swift and final justice to all concerned.

King Shahrayar's revenge

This guy can't believe what just happened!

Stories within stories within stories

5 Days // 5 Drawings

I decided not to blog my drawings every day; that would just be too much.  Doing them everyday is enough work!  I fell a day behind on Saturday because, well it was the weekend and I just didn't think about it.  I have caught up now though, so I at day 7 I am still on schedule.

These are all over the place and so rough.  Welcome to my head!

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Day 3

Favourite Food

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I have spent a good chunk of my life as a vegetarian.  These days I mostly don't eat meat, but do still eat meat sometimes, if that makes sense.  When I do eat animals I get free range / organic and appreciate it.  I also try not to ignore where it came from (ie animals).  It's easy to forget when it comes clean, sliced and wrapped in plastic that that ham used to be a pig.

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Day 3

Favourite Place

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What a thing to have to decide! let alone draw.

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Day 3

Best Friend

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Again, I'm not an eight year old girl (anymore) but in the spirit of things; here's Ross.

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Day 3

Favourite Character

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He's not literary, but on Sunday I was watching 30 Rock and squealing about how much I love Kenneth.  This is grotesque and half melted.

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Day 3

Favourite Quote

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I'm learning to not deliberate about the prompt too much.  I have other stuff to do with my days as well people!

30 Day Drawing Challenge

A drawing a day for 30 days.  That's the challenge.  

I found a list that laid down the gauntlet and suggests something to draw each day.  I'm not sure who created it, so I can't give credit, but I think I'm a bit late to start because there's a Movember reference.

an anonymous challenge

No matter.  I gave it some serious thought because it's quite a commitment (especially over Xmas time) but decided that even if I only take one minute to do the drawing it's worth while.  My other concern is that some of the things I have to draw are quite introspective and I'm not very good at that.  I don't even like playing 'favourite ___' and there are a few of those.

This aint gonna be easy...

Here are my drawings from yesterday and today.

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Day 1

Self Portrait

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Feeling shy and psychedelic, so I did a Seurat / CMYK thing in ink.  The yellow didn't scan so it looks a little less fluro here than in real life.

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Day 2

Favourite Animal

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I almost went for Okapi, but still after all these years I think I would go for a Horse when pressed for my favourite animal.

Zoo Day!

Last Friday I went to the Zoo (ZSL London Zoo) and had a brilliant time looking at the beautiful//crazy animals.  I'm ambivalent about zoos because it's hard to prioritise the happiness of the animals when people also pay to get a good look at them, but I do like seeing the animals.  I think London Zoo does a very good job in general.  Definitely the least satisfied-looking animals are the Tigers; one was just pacing a figure eight by the fence until the crowd grew too big and then it moved to another spot.  But I was happy to see a poster showing the new Tiger pen that they are going to build and it's big!

These are my photos from the day, and a couple of sketches thrown in for good measure.  Pretty self-explanatory (but I can't label them all because I can't remember what they all are).  :)

  

Cheers!