For years, drawing has been a basic element of my paintings.  As I’ve explained earlier, I often draw onto the blank canvas, most often with charcoal, before working into it with acrylic paint.

I’ve been looking carefully at some of the much smaller stand alone drawings I’ve done over recent years, and I’ve noticed changes in emphasis and even in materials occur. Some years I worked quite a lot with computer drawings….such as the following…

done probably about 2009.

More recently I’ve concentrated more on slightly more figurative drawings, hand drawn on paper.  Such as:

This drawing is pastel and china marker on paper.

Each ‘series’ of drawings has different effects on the paintings I’m doing at the time. Not in the sense of being a direct influence, but in terms of mind-set? I guess I’d call it.

In the next blog I want to think a bit more about the interactions between the way of drawing and the way of making paintings….it is related, but not easily described.