Early Artwork

As those of you who follow my blog know, I took art up to A level at school, then I put my pencils down and barely picked them up again until a couple of years ago.  Last weekend, I persuaded my long-suffering hubby to drag down my school portfolios from the loft and had a good old rummage through them.  The most surprising thing was how many large artworks there were; I'd forgotten just how many larger-scale (A1) pieces I'd worked on.  I can see it wasn't my greatest forté - and if you follow me on Facebook, you probably know how much I love small-scale!

Sadly, I can't show you the largest pieces, as my scanner is only A4, and I couldn't get them to stay on the door so I could photograph them, so I've just included a few of the smaller pieces, plus an A3 pastel and a photo of my A-level art piece.

This was from my fourth year Communications project (don't ask me what fourth year translates to in today's schooling terms, because I haven't a clue!).  I can see the errors, but it was quite a good exercise in perspective.

These were sketches of my hands for a graphic design project (not my strongest point!) - I included them because it amused me to see my stumpy little paws - they're still the same!  And they're exactly the same shape and size as my Mum's. Definitely not artist's fingers ... ;)

This was an attempt at a portrait of my lovely Grandad.  It's not perfect, but it does look like him.  Brought a tear to my eye, too.  RIP, Grandad. x

A random cat that I copied from somewhere - no idea where, it certainly wasn't one of ours!

And finally, some colour!  Pencil has always been my medium of choice; I did a lot of painting at school, but it was never particularly successful.  This was an experiment with pastels.  I think it may have been a depiction from a character from a novel.  I did a lot of that - still do, in fact.

And finally, my A-level piece.  We had a choice of whether to use Letraset (anyone remember that?!) or draw our own letters, and I chose to draw mine.  Coloured pencils, of course!  It's a photo, so it's not very good quality.  The butterfly's hiding a mistake!  This is on my Mum and Dad's wall - upstairs, thankfully.  It's quite a large piece.

So that's a tiny fraction of my schoolwork, and most of it hasn't been seen in a looong time!  It was a little bizarre looking back at it and remembering drawing some of it.  Where have all those years gone, eh?  The only thing I really miss is the student discount at the local art shop, though!