take a pinch of keyhole

(Click on drawing to view)

This drawing had all the ingredients to be great. A beautiful subject matter courtesy of my friend Annette. Stunning colours. Heaps of nostalgia. And hours of time to simmer. Somehow, for me, it falls short of being an extremely tasty dish.

Everyday Matters #37, draw some keys.

all i wanna do

The Travel Moleskine

Click HERE to see my Travel Moleskine, so far.

I thought I'd condense this travel themed Moleskine down to one post, so that it's not dominating the main page of my blog. Instead of cutting it down, however, I've just ended up doing a big huge Moley post. But, what's wrong with a bit of Moleskine love between consenting adults, eh?

The most frequently asked question from visitors to my blog, who are not part of the drawing community, is what is a Moleskine? Well, Moleskines are sketchbooks. Great ones! I think the mark of a really great product is when you don't have to advertise, your customers do the advertising for you. HERE is a link to my first ever Moleskine post, from my first ever Moleskine. I was smitten straight away.

The Ballpoint Moleskine

HERE you can see the beginnings of my Ballpoint Moleskine. It's a bit rubbish, so far, but it's just the start.

The Spare Moley

And, HERE you'll find the drawings from my Spare Moleskine. A kind of back up Moley. It's the substitute I call off the bench when the others are worn out from too much cross hatching.

The Sepia One

Finally, you'll see the entire set of drawings from my Sepia Moleskine HERE. It's the only one, to date, that I've finished.

But mostly, I'm the most excited about my New Moley. Which'll be coming to your screen some time soon.

And, if you are not convinced about how great the Moleskine is yet, check out Moleskinerie for all things Moley.

(Surely, I've broken some kind of record for the use the word Moleskine in one blog post? Somebody call Norris McWhirter.)

the ghosts of night, the dreams of day

Somebody, who was recently leafing through one of my sketchbooks, remarked on how unsketchbooky my sketchbooks are. It's true, of course. Almost all of my books are obsessively finished and presented. I rarely sketch, and have been meaning to change the name of this blog from 'sketchblog' to 'drawing blog' for as long as I can remember. I see every sketchbook I'm working on as being an actual finished piece. As a whole.

So, I don't really own any sketchy type sketchbooks. I do, however, have books that are filled with words, quotes, titles, names. References, basically. Ideas and references. They are the closest I get to a sketchbook. In the past I always wanted to be the kind of artists that is really sketchy and loose in the way they work. Here, in a pathetic attempt to show how sketchy and free and easy I am, I turned one of my reference pages into this drawing. Convinced? Nah, me neither. It just looks like a doodle by somebody with a serious mental illness.

I have accepted that I am not one of those artists. I'm as obsessive as the day is long. And what's really bugging me about this drawing is that I didn't add more to it, especially in the bottom left hand corner. There's always tomorrow, I suppose.