Charcoal & Bichrome Wash Sketches, Bristol 1996

This gallery contains 5 to 15 minute charcoal and bichrome wash sketches. They are drawn on Borden & Riley 24” by 36” ‘penny bond’ paper using square willow charcoal or carbon pencil with warm+cool watercolour washes. Some of these were done at the Drawing Centre at the UWE Bower Ashton campus and the rest at my studio in Montpelier. This was a tiny space in a spare bedroom, so I was often too close to the model to see or draw the entire figure, while there were no suitable items of furniture to vary the poses, except a small wooden dias about a foot high, putting the models head above my eye line, which resulted in a lot of headless standing torso images.

When I returned to Bristol from the USA in 1996 I soon got hired as the first employee in an engineering startup company. Within a few months the workload there had increased to the level where, for the first time in my life, I had no spare time to draw or paint for a long period. In fact I did no fine artwork at all for the next eight years. The pictures in this gallery are among the last I made before this situation arose.