Bow peep?

Poet quoet

The absence of drawings on this blog recently is probably more distressing for me than it is for anyone else, but it looks as if it may continue for a while. As a substitute, and for a change, here's a quote from my favourite dead poet, Ted Hughes. It's about writing but it applies equally well to drawing, and neatly ploughs over acres of theoretical claptrap about how to write - or how to draw:

… imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic. If you do this you do not have to bother about commas and full stops or that sort of thing. You do not look at the words either. You keep your eyes, your ears, your nose, your taste, your touch, your whole being on the thing you are turning into words. The minute you flinch, and take your mind off this thing, and begin to look at the words and worry about them… then your worry goes into them and they set about killing each other. So you keep going as long as you can, then look back and see what you have written. After a bit of practice, and after telling yourself a few times that you do not care how other people have written about this thing, this is the way you find it; and after telling yourself you are going to use any old word that comes into your head so long as it seems right at the moment of writing it down, you will surprise yourself. You will read back through what you have written and you will get a shock. You will have captured a spirit, a creature.
Ted Hughes

He played an étude...

...and lost.

Notice: Due to
Health and
Safety Chopin
will no longer
be played at
concerts.

The James Gang

This is a 3D drawing. If you click on it you'll find that it magically comes towards you so you can see it more clearly. I hope I haven't let this technical effect get in the way of the story.

To bacco and beyond!

This pipe dream is another old drawing from around the time of the previous two old drawings.
Using a charcoal pencil with coloured pencils caused me some misery. My Derwent pencils are a joy to use but they tend to obliterate the drawing, so it needs 'topping up' to give it some weight. If there was any subtlety in my line it was gone by the time I'd finished with it, and I'd end up with something remarkably unsubtle like this, which also seems to have suffered from not enough fixative.
Lesson: don't do it.