Thursday seems to come around both quickly and as if it’s been an age since last Thursday. As it’s Thursday, that means it’s time for a new colouring template /coloring page for the members of Angela Porter’s Coloring Book Fans facebook group.
This week’s template is a typically ‘Angela’ entangled style drawing. A stylised dragonfly floats above an entangled background containing arches and seed pods, flowers and foliage, along with various patterns and an intricate border.
I’ve chosen to part colour the template in a monochrome scheme of greens. I don’t really pay attention to light source much. mostly I use light and shadow as part of the patterns and a way to introduce a sense of depth and dimension to my art. This is something I realised only recently.
This is one of a couple of drawings I have on the go at the moment. The scan has washed out and altered the colours a tad. The gradations of colour are a lot smoother too. But I think you get the idea.
This was was drawn with Copic Multiliners on heavy smooth cartridge paper by Daler Rowney. I’m using Staedtler and Chameleon fineliners to add texture/pattern to the drawing. The larger areas of colour were achieved with Carbothello pastel pencils and a paper tortillon.
I was going to stick to a monochrome colour scheme, but some of those tendrils, fronds and leaves just needed a touch of a muted green. And then that led me to including that central ‘orb’ of turquoise (which isn’t as pale or lacking gradient as it appears).
I’m getting to the point where I need to decide how much white space to leave in the design, and where I’m going to add colour and/or texture and pattern. I also need to think about whether some of those coloured spaces need either more shadow or lightening up a bit. That means it’s time for me to take a break from this particular artwork and go and do another or something else completely different!
Before that, there are elements in this design that I really like – the strange columns/antenna at the top and bottom left, the organic trellis of fronds in the largest part of the design. That horizontal bar towards the top. however, just jars with the rest of th design.
A different work in progress today. I started this one late last night and continued for a while after breakfast this morning. I used a Pilot G-Tec C4 pen, which has a very fine tip, on white acid-free cartridge paper (the camera flash has turned it a creamy colour, I have no idea why!).
It is always a pleasurable experience to draw with such a fine pen and to created such detailed and intricate designs. No real thought or planning, just trusting my intuitive creative instincts.
Purely abstract drawing, using my favourite shapes, motifs and texture patterns, along with a few new motifs that have developed as I’ve drawn this. It looks like a weird assemblage of bits and pieces, mechanical and sculptural, botanical and textural.
Assemblage is a fairly good way to describe my signature style of drawing. There are layers of all kinds of bits and pieces – flowers, mechanical tubes and pieces, textural areas, pipes, sculptural bits and bobs, seeds or berries and curls.
What is hidden beneath the various layers? Where did all the bits and pieces come from? What was disassembled or broken to liberate the pieces? Who or what did the disassembling, and why? What new things could they be assembled into? What dream fragments, story parts of my unconscious mind do they represent?
I can spot various influences in the bits and bobs present in the drawing – Mayan sculpture, dials and mechanical levers, pipes and conduits, discs and berry lights, flowers and seeds, textures and patterns, arches and columns, rocks and strata.
What do you see in this drawing? Leave me a comment, I would be intrigued to know!
Angela Porter 