Gavin McDermott

In a keep-my-hand-in kind of way I tried using (willow) charcoal on A2 cold-pressed (aka ‘NOT’) watercolour paper–the woman who sold it to me at Cass Art in Liverpool was impressed (and maybe a bit intimidated) that I was going to fill the pages with watercolour, not realising my cunning plan was with the black stuff…

Anyway, I’ve previously used smooth cartridge paper and for this textured paper ‘the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away’. The blacks are/were sumptuous but much harder to erase back to nothing–paper towel, putty rubber, plastic eraser only got as far as pale grey (Especially important for the first one, which was drawn by eye in charcoal, no measurement, no grid …and definitely a bit off = needed a few course corrections).

For the second one I (half-heartedly) measured the eyes and a couple of other bits with a ruler, but somehow achieved a likeness, especially after I moved an eye up!

And for the final two, I tried something completely different: a simple (very approximate) transfer : I drew a few guidelines in Procreate, exported these lines into a jpeg and pasted into an A2 Affinity Publisher page. I then printed these really simple lines as four tiled A4 pages and then used a bit of charcoal on some sugar paper and traced the lines right way round (really simple, and just eye width, nose, lips and ears).

Anyway, not quite as suffocating as grid, and worked reasonably well, and here they are.