Something I drew a while ago, when I decided to look for things around the house that I could draw, rather than from photos.
This was the first thing I did, a pair of my brown shoes on top of a stool.
There are another 3 in the series of "things around the house", which I will post at some stage in the future.
2023, Ballpoint Pen on 5” x 8” (10” x 8” Double page spread) acid free Moleskine sketchbook paper, Adobe Photoshop. Based on a photo (by David Redfern/Getty Images) of the singer, songwriter and civil rights activist performing at the BBC Television Centre in London, January 1966. Last sketchbook piece for 2023. 2024 will be my last year on this platform - thank you all for appreciating and following my artistic progress.
Dmitry Shostakovich (1906–1975)
Shostakovich’s contemporaries do not recall seeing him working, at least not in the traditional sense. The Russian composer was able to conceptualize a new work entirely in his head, and then write it down with extreme rapidity—if uninterrupted, he could average twenty or thirty pages of score a day, making virtually no corrections as he went.
But this feat was apparently preceded by hours or days of mental composition—during which he “appeared to be a man of great inner tensions,” the musicologist Alexei Ikonnikov observed, “with his continually moving, ‘speaking’ hands, which were never at rest.”
Shostakovich himself was afraid that perhaps he worked too fast. “I worry about the lightning speed with which I compose,” he confessed in a letter to a friend. Undoubtedly this is bad. One shouldn’t compose as quickly as I do. Composition is a serious process, and in the words of a ballerina friend of mine, “You can’t keep going at a gallop.” I compose with diabolical speed and can’t stop myself.… It is exhausting, rather unpleasant, and at the end of the day you lack any confidence in the result. But I can’t rid myself of the bad habit.
- From Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey
#dailyrituals #inktober #shostakovich @masoncurrey
Neal has found another Labrador – her name is Bella. He has also met Peter. Peter is worried about Neal. He thinks the boy might be a runaway. He is also about to patiently explain to Neal that when a dog is wearing a nametag with their owner’s info on it, then that dog is not an unwanted stray, as Neal seems to believe, but just a missing dog.
Freehand sketching in ink from a photo reference I found online, to practice conveying that lots-of-stones look without drawing all the stones (photo credit: K. Mitch Hodge). Micron pens + alcohol markers.
The source reference image was from an impromptu photo shoot I did several years ago. The available light in the room was magical and the model was just sitting there meditating.
Pencil, Charcoal Pencil, Pastel Pencils on 9” x 12” Strathmore Archival Sketchbook Paper.
For a long time, I always misheard the lyrics in the song ‘Torn Green Velvet Eyes’ by The Magnetic Fields as ‘Tom Green Velvet Eyes’… told myself that one day I’d draw something inspired by this mishearing of things and well, here you go!
