| Christine | Farmer |

As some of you will know, progress on the new drawing has been very slow due to my troubles with a frozen shoulder, which has made work extremely difficult. However, I thought I’d post some of the photographs I have of the most recent work on the dining room chair in the bottom right of the drawing. The picture above is a close-up of the back of the chair, to show the stipple detail of sky and chair. As you can see if you click on the thumbnail, I’m using a kind of pattern in the stipples which gives a nice texture to the sky. The chair is first stippled to give the tone, and then the woodgrain effect is added using small lines made with the Rotring pen. This can be seen in the upright on the far right of the chair back, and in the final picture at the foot of the post.

 Click on the thumbnails for a closer look:

The pencil marks behind the chair are where the clouds will be. I pencil in the parts I want to be light, and stipple around them, removing the pencil and adding ink details later. Below is a photograph of a section of the drawing on the drawing table, which gives some idea of texture and scale. There is also a clue as to what is outside the window, the detail of which will be revealed in a future post.

Follow these link to see the overall design as well as earlier updates on this drawing and reference photographs. And go here to see more drawings in my gallery.

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Another two weeks has gone by since I last posted an update, and as you may imagine, my feelings at the moment are that the progress is slow and painful. I spend most days with a magnifying glass in my left hand as I work gradually across the paper, going back and back again over clouds, deepening the shadow each time. I haven’t kept an exact tally on the hours I’m at the drawing board, or even the weeks now. Here are scans of the progress so far (click on images for detail).

The first section of the drawing was the quickest and easiest: the sky through the window (below) was based on some evening clouds I photographed out of my bedroom window, which for some reason became twisted up and not how I’d really imagined them. I knew I wanted them to be threatening, distorted and unusual, but they came out even more surprising. They remind me of something seen through a microscope, or telescope.

I’m still not certain what I want to have through the bottom half of the window. My initial ideas were of hands pushing against the panes, and even to use real fingerprints to form clouds. I have left them blank for the time being and it will become clearer to me later in the process what needs to go there.

The skies around the window (below) are a different matter. They’re made up of clouds I photographed on several days this summer, some on Clee Hills where I took the initial photographs of the dining chair, some from my garden. The process with these clouds, as they are so detailed, is very slow and quite agonising some days. The good news is that my headaches have actually reduced over the past months, and so I’m fairly certain they’re not down to eye strain, which was a concern of mine initially. Anyway, here are some closer details of these clouds, none of which are anywhere near completion yet.

Here’s an idea of what I see when I’m drawing (below). Some days I do wonder why I’ve set myself such a task: why I don’t just pick up a pencil and do things that way. It’s quite difficult to give an impression of what it’s like sitting here and being absorbed into a world of clouds upon clouds. It’s irritating, and compulsive. And sometimes it’s even satisfying… but I haven’t got to that stage with this drawing yet. There’s still far to far to go, and what I mainly see is white paper and things that need fixing.

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A week after my previous post and the top two panes of the window are now more or less complete – I won’t know whether more inking is needed on that area until I’ve completed the skies outside the window, the early stages of which you can see in today’s pictures.

The two images on the left show the development of the summer skies: far more shading is needed at the moment, especially within the cloud which needs a lot more depth. The picture on the right shows a close-up of the stipples in this area. Click on the thumbnails for a closer look.

At this stage the early worries about whether or not I’m putting too much ink on and destroying everything are gone, and the biggest issues are different. The main thing to deal with is the eye strain, looking at something so small through a magnifying glass, and the frustration of slow progress while every stipple needs to be in almost exactly the right place. It has been a long time since I drew anything quite so detailed, and I had forgotten just how demanding it is. Still, it’s begun now and I am anxious to find out how it’s going to look.

The one thing I’m fairly pleased with at this stage is the overall composition, and I’m glad I spent so long getting that right. At the moment I’m uncertain exactly what I’m going to put in the foreground, but my early idea is to put in floorboards and perhaps mosses. I will have to take more photographs for that stage. What I’m doing at the moment is continuing across the top part of the summer skies, while darkening the clouds on the left, but not too much, as I want there to be a complete contrast between what is through the window, and what is around the window.

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Born in Birmingham, I live and work in Stourbridge, England. As an artist, I work primarily in pen and ink, in a realist drawing style, and the themes of my work are memory, remains, and place. My drawings are composed of many thousands of dots of ink or stipples, and other small marks, and can take hundreds of hours to complete. 

You can view a selection of my drawings in the galleries section, or read more about me and the way I work in the about the artist section, which covers the stippling technique. You can also keep up to date with what I’m working on in my art blog, which you can subscribe to by clicking on the “Subscribe” button on the navigation on the right, or via the subscribe page. Please visit the contact page to get in touch.   

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