The BIG ONE, Slate and where next.

Above is the new piece of slate as I stopped last night, I can see now that I have quite a bit of work to do on it yet, more white I think. I am realising that even at the moment this slate has a good few thousand dots, I am certainly not counting them all but I can imagine someone might, Ok not everybody but someone might.

Looking at the image as I type I am thinking that you do accept this shape to be a square but not a perfect one. I do spend quite a lot of time looking at unfinished drawings as the work progresses, I suppose it is my equivalent of standing back from the easel. I feel it is good to have a good ruminate over a cup of coffee and with Giles Peterson playing some of the most interesting tunes from Steven Spacek to the new Radiohead single and many other inspiring tunes.

I have been building up to getting back on with The Big one, it has slightly daunted me over recent days. I don't know why it has actually made me feel a little that way but I have invested so much time on it already and soon If I get on with it it shouldn't be too long until its completion. I am loving the way the small dots surrounding the main black star have graded themselves in the way the randomness of the darker and light dots as the pen reacts to being worn out. On those small dots I have used two pens so far and the second might make it with just four pocket of space to fill.

Here is the preparatory work for my next large scale drawing. This background was done with a berol water colour pen, this has been in the back of my mind since I took some work into the gallery and as Melanie from the UYS Gallery was looking at some of my portfolio work saw it and gave it a good look and then said, 'what are you going to to with this one' of course my reply was put some dots on it. Such a succinct and vague reply that was. My thoughts are now not fully formed, what kind of dots?
Sometimes in this process of finishing a previous drawing it all comes into focus or just feeds straight from the previous drawing but I am not sure this is the case on this one. So quiet frankly the only thing I have on offer is not putting a dot n the blue, a 'blue berol window' and it might work very well but it has to be an idea interesting enough for me to spend all that time on. I think the only reason I have for not having more ideas than that is that the Blackstar/Starman drawing is so personal to me through its many David Bowie connotations, well that is some of the stuff that goes through my mind this late Saturday afternoon. I need another coffee before I continue drawing.