Life drawing, from sketchbook into A2 charcoal finished work …..
Following on from my last post, I have now completed a finished A2 sized Charcoal drawing based on the sketch work I posted two days ago.
I have very much enjoyed this process of working from sketchbook into a full sized drawing and I intend to use this method from now on 
…….
Figure drawing from the studio, May 2021
Charcoal on Paper
Nigel Borrington
May 2021
For sometime I have wanted to start sharing my charcoal and pencil figure drawings here on my blog, first however I wanted to get my drawing skills up-to a level I was truly happy with, I feel that I still have a lot of work to do in order to be consistent from drawing to drawing.
I am happy however to start sharing with people some of the drawings and painting I have been creating, this drawing was produced today , drawing as freely as possible and doing my best to make the minimum of marks needed to produce the finish work ……
New Art work 2020, A still life drawing of two Pears using ICON – Chalk Pastels
Still life study ,
Two pears,
Icon Chalk Pastels on Paper
Nigel Borrington 2020
Created as one of my first still life studies while attending an evening class at our local art school KCAT, located here in Callan, County Kilkenny this drawing is made using Chalk Pastels on cartridge paper. I love this type of still life study very much , it gave me a great chance to use ICON Chalk pastels for the first time and I loved the experience of using them and the results they created. The strong marks used to build up shades and form I truly feel creates a very strong result. 🙂
A weekends Drawing – Manchester’s Industrial Landscape ( Charcoal on Paper )
Manchester’s Industrial Landscape
In the style of Trevor Grimshaw
Nigel Borrington
March 2020
This weekend I gave myself sometime to add a physical Charcoal on cartridge paper drawing to last weeks Digital version in my last post. I wanted to do some work in the style of Trevor Grimshaw as I like his drawings very much and felt there was a lot of value in attempting to produce my own versions, I feel that his use of monochrome with its many varying tones, so carefully worked is wonderful…
So here is my first attempt to produce an A3 size drawing 🙂 I am happy with the results but will keep working hard in order to refine this style of working with Charcoal as a medium ……
I also want to add some Acrylic painting works to the project but for now I am loving using Charcoal 🙂
Charcoal drawing – A tribute to the work of Trevor Grimshaw …….
Digital Charcoal drawing
In the style of Trevor Grimshaw
Following my post yesterday, I have started working with my PC based art application ( Krita ) in order to use its charcoal drawings tools to recreate as best as I can the landscapes style of Trevor Grimshaw.
Tomorrow I will give myself time to work at my desk with actual physical charcoal and chalk, I do feel very much however that a digital method of producing a work of art is just as valid in 2020, as working with physical materials, every mark made on my drawing above is made manually using a Wacom art tablet with an art pen. I often use this method of working to work out just how best to construct drawings and painting, when later it comes to sitting down with a sheet of physical paper or canvas.
February evening at Beach : Duncannon Beach, Co.Wexford, Ireland
Duncannon Beach, County Wexord, Digital painting,
Nigel Borrington 2020
February evening at Duncannon Beach
The light by the last wave lingers on fronds
of seaweed fingering wave-wet rocks where
brim-filled pools overflow before they
empty when the water surges then sucks,
surges, then sucks.
glistening, sun warmed, lit by the last
light of day while slow footsteps meander
with the gentle waves rhythms, rising, falling,
so calming in my ears, that crest falling
with an almost silent swish, hearbeat’s grace.
All troubles tumbled away calmed first,
washed by light where the last wave lingers.
Kilkenny landscape art – Charcoal and Pastels on Paper
KIlkenny Landscape art
Charcoal and Pastels on Cartridge paper
Format 297 × 420 mm
Nigel Borrington 2019
Monday Drawing
Kilkenny landscape – A Charcoal and Pastels on Paper
This week I plan to continued building up my painting and drawing skills, I will continue selected from my landscape photographs and selecting ones that I wfeel will make good Mono drawings and paintings.
This evening I have just finished the above Charcoal and Pastel landscape, its drawn on A2 paper but framed for A3 dimensions. This is a good size from drawing as I feel I can work freely with this size, letting the charcoal move openly. It lets me stand up above by drawing board and move the Charcoal and Pastels with fully movement of my arms.
Just like with my last post I plan next to work the same landscape view in Acrylic paints working with cool grey tones to capture the feeling of a cold grey day, just like the day that I captured the original black and white image on.
Art Project – Kilkenny winter landscape – Photo,Drawing and Acrylic painting.
January Forst
County Kilkenny
Irish Landscape Photography
Nigel Borrington 2019
Kilkenny winters Landscape project Jan 2019
This is the complete set of images including the original photograph, then the Charcoal and Pencil drawing and Acrylic painting on canvas, from the set of county Kilkenny landscape in winter photos captured last week and that I have spent most of this week working on.
This is only the first set of images and I have a lot more work to do yet to produce final drawings and painting of both this single photo and then the full set of other images I want to use. I am happy with the results so far as this is the first none digital art work that I have worked on for a while.
The main thing at the moment is that I am enjoying the process very much, its taken a while to get my art desk setup again and to get all the materials in place but now this is done I can just get working and start having some fun getting creative.
county kilkenny landscape art
The view from Ballycuddihy
Charcoal and Graphite on paper
nigel borrington 2019
This drawing uses Charcoal and Graphite pencils on paper to produce what I hope is a moody image of a winters morning over the local Kilkenny landscape.
County Kilkenny in Winter
Acrylic on Canvas
Nigel Borrington 2019
This Painting was produced using greys mixed from Acrylic (Cerulean blue, Crimson, Yellow Ocha and titanuim white)to produces grades of Greys, some cool and some warmer.
I hope that this helps to set a feeling of winter in my local Kilkenny landscape, on what was a very cold and frosty morning in mid January 2019.
County Kilkenny Art – The view from Ballycuddihy – charcoal and graphite drawing
County Kilkenny landscape art The view from Ballycuddihy
Charcoal and Graphite on paper
nigel borrington 2019
The view from Ballycuddihy – charcoal and graphite on paper
In my last post I uploaded some photos taken in the hills at Ballycuddihy county Kilkenny, I want to use these images and others as the source for a series of both drawings and acrylic paintings.
So over the weekend I started with a charcoal and graphite drawing. I like very much using these two drawing materials as I like to strip an image down into its monochrome tonal values before returning to repeating the painting in acrylic or oil paint and bring in colour paints. I plan this time however to paint these landscape views using acrylic paint, using black and white only, keeping the finished work to a maximum of ten grey scale values.
Here I have used the charcoal in both willow stick and compressed block form to produce a series of tonal values, using a brush to soften the charcoal into different grey values and tonal grades.The fine details in the drawing are created using graphite.
I am happy with the finished results considering that the drawing was completed within four hours, I have learnt many things here and will repeat this technique many time so that I keep getting to know much more about using charcoal and pencil together.
A Weekend in an Art Course – The art of colour mixing , Rod Moore
Art Courses 2019 – The art of colour mixing , Rod Moore
I have been into art and painting most of my life and you never stop needing to learn new areas or keep going back to basic and practice old ones, so at the start of this year I registered on a Udemy course run by Rod Moore (Rod Moore, Complete Colour mixing course for artists).
I started the course last week in the evenings and so far its very good, I like very much the structure of the courses run by Udemy as they are perfect for adult study allowing you to use your spare time to gain new skills.
Here are some of the basic colour mixing techniques I have covered so far…..
Creating a colour mixing wheel.
Here the colours provided in my watercolour palette are laid out on the very outside of the wheel, working inwards I have mixed the primary colours of Blue, Red and then Yellow to show the results of mixing primary colours.
Mixing Blue, Reds, Yellow and Greens.
Most sets of paints contain more than one type of Blue, Red, Yellow and green paints, so in the above images I have worked on taking all the paints in these groups one by one and mixing them with the other paints outside the selected group. The first image for example is using two versions of green, the second two versions of blue – then mixing these with all the other remaining colours.
This type of colour mixing produces some very interesting results and helps show just how different the results of mixing different Blues, Reds, Yellows and Greens with other colours can be.
Landscape colour mixing – wheel and chart.
As said above different available paints can fall into the basic descriptions of blues or yellows and reds, but are individually very different from each other, in the images above I have painted a colour wheel that uses more earth versions of these primary colours.
These versions of the Primary colours (Blue,Red and Yellow) when mixed help to produce results much more likely to be used in Landscape Painting, you can see that they results in a much more earthy looking colour wheel than one produced by more standard primary colours.
I have also produced a colour chart on the right hand side of this page that shows the same mixing results but in block of colour, the standard mixing chart is in the centre of the page and as you can see this produces a much more vivid set of resulting colours, ones much less suitable for landscape painting.
One thing I have noticed while working through these exercises is that watercolour paint does not mix very well compared to Acrylic or Oil paints, which both produce much better stronger results. Its harder to get watercolour to produce many different levels of the mixed colour and for these results to have much depth to them , so my next stage is to repeat all these exercises using artists acrylic paints.
So all in all I feel great about working with this course and had a very enjoyable time over the weekend, I am not intending to turn my blog into just Art and Painting so for now I will return to some photography but its be great fun sharing something different 🙂
Nigel Borrington 
You must be logged in to post a comment.