1 of 20 LITTLE LANDSCAPES

This is the first of a little ink landscape that will be sold for 50p/£1 at my daughter's school's Christmas fair. I've been volunteered to draw 100 pictures for the first week of December so part of what I'll do will be these landscape types and the remainder will be along the lines of my children's drawings. The money raised will go to charity so I can't even complain about the workload.

AFRICAN ELEPHANT INK SKETCH

Here I've drawn a quick sketch of an African elephant walking through shallow water in ink. When drawing living things I try and keep the sketch lively by rendering the marks quickly and without too much fuss. Of course with animals, being able to draw rapidly is often an essential requirement.

QUICK INKY LANDSCAPE

Whilst messing around with ink late last night I happened to make this atmospheric drawing almost completely by accident. It's only a very small drawing (no more than four inches across) which I've decided looks too much like a landscape for me not to call it a landscape. It's ambiguous as to what it actually depicts but I think there are trees and water in there along with a silhouetted figure in the foreground.

I hope this demonstrates how effective just spending a couple of minutes pushing ink around on a piece of scrap paper can be.

APERI-TIFF

This watercolour drawing has been lifted from my sketchbook. I did this in August last year and it's a woman who came round for an aperitif when I was in France. She was always popping in for an aperitif but this is a big thing in France- sitting down half an hour before you eat to discuss food before eating the food and discussing the next aperitif and who's holding it and what the next meal will be and who's invited, and more importantly, who isn't.

It can all become a bit of a soap opera and is a source of disagreements and bad will.

Anyway, this lady was already 'aperitifed-up' before she came over and the unforgiving August sun that shines on the South, mixed with the alcohol, made her louder and more argumentative than usual. I don't think she was invited to the next one but she's French and does as she pleases so not getting an invite wouldn't necessarily have stopped her.

SYLVESTER McCOY

A fair while ago I went through a phase of drawing portraits just to keep my eye in whenever work was slow or non existant and this is a pencil drawing of Sylvester McCoy. I know what youre thinking here: 'Please, not another Dr Who!'

Sorry about this. I've always felt that one good way to learn to draw is by drawing the things you're really keen on and I've been a bit of a Dr Who anorak since I was about 5. And as a young man it was easier to get hold of pictures of Dr Who than it was to get hold of pictures of girls I liked. Sadly.

This drawing has been cropped because he was wearing a hat and that turned out to be a disaster. I'm ok with faces, more or less, but hats are a right pain. Especially straw ones.

BEAUTY AND THE BEASTS SKETCHBOOK ROUGH

This is the rough of the Beauty and the Beasts post I put up on 2nd May which I did in my little A5 sketchbook. After I'd done the initial rough, I decided bits and pieces needed changing or improving. With this in mind I did corrections on a separate piece of paper and stuck them over the parts I wasn't so keen on which you'll see if you look closely at the picture.

I also added extra little details to make the composition more pleasing and fill the space better. Once I started on the final drawing I continued to add further small detailing to improve the illustration and make it more interesting.

CHARCOAL AND WASH FOOT DRAWING

Here's another attempt at a foot drawing and this time I've added a Quink wash over the charcoal to get some tonal variation. Again, as with the previous foot drawing I posted, this is a fairly large piece of paper I'm working on to accommodate my fairly large feet.

The washes were applied by holding the paint brush between my toes. As before, very little control can be managed by doing this but that makes for a more interesting mark I think. I find it's quite refreshing to do a drawing like this just for fun with no pressure to get it right and to have no preconceived ideas as to how it'll turn out.