Pencils4Tea 24 September 2026

Glad I'm getting back into the groove of attending Pencils4Tea, although the routine will be broken in October. Still, every practise counts. 

Pencils4Tea 17 September 2026

Continuing my exploration with Lyra watersoluble graphite chunky pencils. Took me a little while to warm up. Should have done a few self-portrait warmups before starting!

 

At the hairdresser's

Experimenting with Lyra watersoluble graphite sticks at the hairdressers. Loving how rich they are, even just the 2B! Strong darks done with 9B! I'm in an exploring-darks kind of mood.

Playing with Lyra watersoluble chunky graphite pencils

The only art I did from Monday to Thursday in first week in September! 

Grangegorman and Barber's Bar

We were blessed with dry weather on 21 December. It did get cool as the sun went down on the shortest day of the year. But we had a lovely pub to retreat to, The Barber's Bar. After working in watercolour and pen outdoors, I moved to pen and 2 black/graphite pencils indoors, as the lighting made it impossible to see colour. I practised the push and pull technique to give my sketch more depth. Really enjoyed it, I have to say, but will need to place a piece of paper to stop it from smudging. I had to use an eraser to remove all the smudge marks from sketcher hands (mine and other sketchers, as we look at each other's sketchbooks).

Pencils4Tea 11 December 2025

It was so sad to hear of Abhinav's sudden passing. He was so young. So the first sketch we did was from a photo of him. I loved his eyebrows!

Pencils4tea 13 November 2025

It was extra fun to have Suhita and Nina posing for this session of Pencils4tea! And Kirsty too of course!

Pencils4Tea 6 November 2025

It was a while since I had attended Pencils4tea. Feeling a bit rusty. But the trick is to keep going. 

And to keep the tools to a minimum.

 

On location at Beara Bowl

I was in Allihies for a few days. On the first day, I drove to the Beara Bowl, just outside the town and spent my time drawing impressions of the landscape. I could have walked, but I didn't want to carry my art supplies. This is actually the one and only time I took the car for the 5 days I was there - the other days, I just reduced the supplies I was carrying in my bag. I am fascinated by the geology in this part of the world. There is so little vegetation that the rocks show every tectonic push.  It's also an area that was rich in copper. I think the copper was embedded in quartz. Maybe it's the quartz that makes the mountains shine when the sun hits them? I didn't get a huge amount of sunshine, but enough to fill my heart with memories that I will try to translate into paintings. And also fill my phone with many photos and videos. 

Here I was playing with sumi ink, Gansai Tambi colours, water-soluble graphite and some pencil. And a Pilot Parallel Pen with a dark blue ink. Done on A4 heavy cartridge paper.

At the market - Sketch with Suhita

I love our monthly sessions with Suhita. Each month, she comes up with an interesting idea, a "how will we solve this problem" question. And then we sketch for half an hour. Love the time element. I think I should set a timer when I'm on location, as I have become slower at sketching and the results are not necessarily better. This was done from a photo of a market stall in Poland. Oh, and I'm also doing the monochrome theme from Liz Steel's Patreon. Not enough hours in the day, so I combined the two!

Pencils4Tea 2 October 2025

Another exploration I'm still on is portraits in graphite, holding the pencil differently than what comes naturally to me (I did not go to art college, and the art teacher in secondary school never encouraged me to learn how to draw.). I'm struggling a bit - it would be a lot more fun to use my stabilo woodies for crazy colours and rosy cheeks - but I will stick at it. It works quite well for beards and moustaches, though. Remember that each of these portraits was done in the time of a song (3 to 5 minutes max). Also I've run out of my smooth paper and I'm using whatever paper is there.