I spent a useful, if dull, afternoon this week scanning in pages from various sketchbooks. I have always loved scribbling away with a pencil, although it's an aspect of my "creative life" that doesn't get much of a public outing. I wouldn't often compare myself to Henri Cartier-Bresson but, like him, I'm privately convinced my drawings are far better than my photographs, even though, inexplicably, no-one else seems to agree.
It only takes a visit to a gallery or two (I was in the Royal Academy on Monday to see the Matisse in the Studio exhibition) to spark the thought, common to all third-rate artists, that surely my stuff could be as good as that? Yeah, right. Only fifty years too late. Nonetheless, I thought it was time I did the chore of some long-overdue scanning, so I would have some new raw material to play with.
Some scribbles just need a little bit of presentation:
Others invite the full Photoshop treatment, like those in the previous post (yes, underneath all the gilding and garish paint-job there is a simple drawing, sometimes two or three combined), while others just need a light touch, rather like hand-tinting an engraving:
The tricky bit is knowing which are which, and how far to go. As Alberto Giacometti said, "That's the terrible thing: the more one works on a picture, the more impossible it becomes to finish it." Tell me about it, Alberto!
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