Mountain Vapour Trail

Lucy Barfoot Mountain Trail

Quick Posca drawing/collage

Recent Collages

Drawing whilst listening

I have always have been a big fan of drawing whilst listening. Some of my favourite things to draw have been born out of attending my old University lectures, pen and paper in hand. Notice how I am not calling this ‘doodling’. That word, to me, is a bit lacklustre. It can be defined as:

Scribble absentmindedly.
Engage in idle activity; dawdle: “they could plan another attack while we’re just doodling around”.

I like to think my drawing has more of a purpose, an outpouring of something, a visual description of someone I am interested in, etc.

Sitting with pen in hand can make me listen better, and also can help me from becoming bored. It’s also one of my favourite things: productive. If I’m sat down, watching something, or someone – I feel much more at ease and able to relax if I’m keeping myself busy with something creative… of course I don’t do this all the time as there is a need to just sit and be sometimes, but I do notice myself enjoying it more if I’m creatively stimulated in some way.

This does come with a risk of becoming distracted by the drawing – paying it too much attention. Although that’s not really a problem in my eyes. I welcome that, especially as I am trying to put more value and importance on drawing.

This week I am volunteering as a Host Delegate at the International Conference on Culture Health and Wellbeing in Bristol, an Arts and Health South-West event. I am spending the beginning of this week ushering people around, telling speakers when they have one minute left of their talks, ticking people off lists, handing things out, being a friendly face, being a bit of a Bristol tour-guide and most interestingly, sitting in on lots of talks on a variety of subjects based around Health and Wellbeing, by lots of interesting speakers.

And I have been drawing.

Day 1.

Day 2:

A workshop on ‘The Cancer Journey’ and ‘Dying Creatively’ very interesting subjects, and I picked up a really interesting titbit: how we humans have so many ways of talking about death and dying, by getting it into conversation: ‘drop dead gorgeous’, ‘dead easy’, ‘dead set’, ‘dead end’, ‘dying to meet him’. A way of making it a softer subject? So that when we have to deal with it, it’s not something wholly new. We’ve been saying the words all along.

Lots of words and sayings in todays drawings: ‘Engaged in a collective endeavour’ (I forgot the U!) ‘Feeling is healing’, a suggestion to say “can we talk about what it’ll be like when you die” to the people around you, to prepare and engage with it. Another suggestion to ‘talk about death in a funny way’ – a coping strategy, and a good way to ‘be’ about it. The ‘What Ever’ is mine – no one said that! Onward to day 3!

DSCF1001

DSCF1011

Day 3: Too busy running about to draw. Boo hoo!

Blind Drawing, Drawing

Telephone Drawings take 2

This wonderful old telephone, previously drawn, used as a prop, kicked about in the studio, hidden away on a shelf…. thought it was time to get it out and draw it again, because that’s always been a good starting point for me when I’m trying to get into the creativity zone or want to actually do some drawing (so very overlooked by me most of the time). So here’s the phone, and the drawings which came out. One is a 5-minute blind drawing. ‘Cos I like that

Drawing

Pencil + Ink Drawing

color, Drawing

Colouring in Hexagons

A beautiful new book, bought in the bookshop attached to the wonderful MACBA – Barcelona’s Museum of Contemporary Art. It’s a notebook with HEXAGON PAPER. That’s right, tiny little hexagons just waiting to be coloured in or for a story to be written, a word in each hexagon. It’s made by ‘Paperways’. I’m excited about the book, and I hear that my delightful friend and fellow creative Angela Chick is using hers now too. We had a little hiatus because the books are so beautiful – you know when you put off using them because they’re so nice.

The notebooks can be bought on Amazon here or here on the InkThistle website – you can see the other lovely Paperways products here too.

Here’s what I have done so far. I seriosly need to get better at colouring within the lines. But those hexagons are very small you see. Drawing with my trusty Pilot 0.4, a very sharp pencil and my ‘Zig Kurecolor’ graphic pens which was given to me as the best Christmas present ever. More about those pens right here.

Hexagon 2

Working out which pens I can use and which I can’t. Some of them bleed too much into the paper you see. I wanted to use light and subtle colours only.

Hexagon 2

Thoughts

Little but effective creative thoughts

A haiku a day for a fortnight
Draw a telephone again
Hand-painted wooden spoons for cooking with
Making objects: shoes with strange laces
An hour of ukulele
A mini-zine made in 30 minutes

Blind Drawing, Drawing

Don’t forget Blind Drawing

It’s great to remember Blind Drawing. I do quite a lot of this at work, but not much personally. I dragged out a roll of paper, got a selection of pens out and went for it. Here are my favourite parts. May this remind me to stop forgetting about Blind Drawing!

Drawing, Silly

Spooning bananas

Quite an exciting lunch break of pingpong, air hockey and pretzels made me draw on my bananas (one for lunch and one for breakfast tomorrow)

Art, Drawing

Triangles with Angela Chick

Angela Chick is beautiful person. I miss her – we met at UCA and now she’s in Brighton and I’m here in Bristol and we don’t see each other much, but we are often on each other’s minds. Last weekend, I had the delight of Angela visiting me. We made things together. The biggest thing was a triangle collaboration, here is a couple of sections of it:

I’ve found myself rather obsessed with triangles later. Here’s some of the triangles which have come out of my hands lately. I rediscovered my Mac liquid eyeliner pen, which is long run out, and I use it as a brush with a pot of ink. It gives a lovely finish and holds the ink for a really long time.

Art, Sketchbook

Sketchbook Scans: More

And not just collaging! I’ve been sticking down all the torn poppies which aren’t good enough to add to the ‘master collection’ (which is getting huge, and I still don’t know what to do with it!) also: drawing naked men, enjoying picures of excited/angry men, using a triangle template, using rainbow pencils, drawing ugly faces and finally, sticking down pictures I find exciting; the ones which I skip past then have to turn back the pages to look at again.