Zero to Hero - 48 hours of Art + Photography highs and lows
Now that I’m tackling physical art as well as digital art and photography, my life can get pretty busy and I sometimes wonder if I’ve bitten off more than I can chew. But… I can’t see what I would give up and they all blend into each other so I just have to fit them in the best I can.
I feel that I lead a very rich life in terms of experiences, beautiful sights and meeting interesting people and I wouldn’t change a thing right now.
So, I thought this blog should be a warts-and-all behind the scenes look at my work and what goes wrong as well as what goes right. I’m covering 48 hours of this week from Monday (29th June) afternoon to Wednesday (1st July) afternoon.
As always, I’ll include photos, which are all mine. You can click to open them in full size in a lightbox.
MONDAY PM
I’ll begin with a low that began on the previous Friday at my drawing and painting class. The tutor asked if anyone was interested in sketching the Morley College fashion show. Being full of enthusiasm in the class, I said yes impulsively, thinking it would be lovely to try. I then received an email from the person running the fashion show which said that we could be filmed and watched as we sketched. Oh oh! I started to get apprehensive. Having rarely drawn people and not at all successfully, I braced myself and thought ok, have a practice, how hard can this be? Most other types of drawing I’ve tried over the past year I’ve been able to have a go. I watched a few YouTube videos about live fashion sketching and wedding guest sketching. Yes, that’s a thing. I thought I’d love to be able to do that. Then I put pen to paper. Aggh! I can only say what a mess! The result was recognisable as a person but had zero proportion, charm or attractiveness. In fact, it was downright ugly! So, after a few more attempts which were only improving ever so slightly, I thought I’d better email a reply to say that I couldn’t come. There had been a let out in the email to say that if it all sounded like too much pressure, then that was fine, there was no obligation. I was disappointed though!
MONDAY EVENING
Never mind, onwards and upwards, I had to get my photography kit ready now for the full moon that night. I was meeting a group of people on Parliament Hill in Hampstead at 9.15. I usually take my kit in a small wheelie suitcase when I’m staying on streets and pavements but tonight involved walking across the park so I packed my rucksack. Being mindful of being out at sunset and in the dark with sandals on (it was still very hot) I sprayed my feet and legs liberally with Jungle Formula and set out as if I was going on a mini field trip.
It was wonderful to be in a group of photography enthusiasts rather than being on my own or with my husband for security/company. Before too long the red, shimmering bubble of the moon broke the horizon to the backdrop of excited gasps and comments. Seeing a full moon break the horizon is one of my favourite natural events. It never fails to be genuinely awe inspiring!
I started to snap away but had a dawning realisation that something wasn’t right. My camera seemed to be frozen!! I couldn’t adjust the settings. Between looking at the moon, trying to concentrate on my camera and getting caught up in the general excitement, I couldn’t process what was happening. Then logic kicked in and I started to think about what I could do to fix this. I tried turning it off and turning it on again a couple of times. Nothing! Then I tried to think of anything that had happened since I had last used my camera when it was working fine. Ah, I had plugged in my external remote trigger so that there wouldn’t be any camera shake. It plugs into the front of the camera so it was awkward to unplug it when I was standing behind it on the tripod. I also couldn’t move very much in case I disturbed the rest of the group. Still, I managed to work it free. Unplugged now, I tried again and my settings went back to working as normal. Whew! Luckily, I can also enable the shutter by tapping on my camera screen so that’s what I had to do, as lightly as I possible could. This was risky though. Although I was using a slow shutter speed which should reduce the amount of any shaking caused by me touching the camera, I wasn’t sure by how much. I was left with the worry that these photos would be shaky or blurry.
Moon photography is unforgiving if you’re not ready in time. From the moment the red globe broke the horizon at 9.48 to it arcing across to the tip of the Shard at 10.02 it was only 14 minutes. So, for those 14 minutes, I was tensely plugging in and unplugging the remote, hoping that at least some of my shots would be good.
I had a quick look on my tiny camera screen on the tube home but it wasn’t until I got home after midnight and downloaded the shots onto my laptop that I breathed a sigh of relief! Most of my shots were good and captured the moon well. All’s well that ends well. Keeping calm and carrying on had worked in my favour.
TUESDAY AM
After the uncertainty of the previous evening, I had a very enjoyable morning selecting and editing my full moon photos and posting them to social media. For a whole year from April 2025 to April 2026 I had kept up a routine of posting to social media twice a week. When I started my drawing and painting course at Morley College though, that fell by the wayside. I was just too distracted by painting. Up to now I’ve only been posting my photography and digital art, keeping my paintings and sketches for my newsletters and occasional Instagram stories. I’m still not quite sure how that will look when I weave it all together, having curated a photography and digital art only feed over the years.
TUESDAY PM
Time to get back to the painting! For a few weeks now, I’ve been working on an idea for a painting based around the Isle of Dogs and the building One Canada Square. I’ve drawn multiple sketches. Some ideas and techniques have been abandoned along the way and some have survived. This afternoon I bit the bullet and laid down the first layer of midnight blue paint for the background on the gesso panel. Midnight blue is one of my favourite colours. It’s the colour of the sky in a lot of my photos. It’s the colour of the sky as blue hour gives way to darkness.
My sketching and painting experiments over the past couple of months have changed how I tackle this painting. My previous one (No. 13 All the Lights… Everywhere, All at Once) was painted entirely with little brushes and acrylic paint and ink markers. For the first coat of this one, which I’m calling No. 14 Angel Isle as a working title, I used a sponge to quickly smear a thick juicy layer of paint all over the board. Very satisfying!
TUESDAY EVENING
Time to get dressed and go to Hackney for a Nimi event, a Secret Salon in an artist’s studio in Hackney. At 7pm I met a small group outside, some of whom I’d met at previous events, and we were led upstairs to the studio. The artist was Alice Irwin, a sculptor, painter and etcher amongst many other talents. She told us all about her processes and what led her to become an artist. Then we were given a tour of her current work. This is the fourth Nimi event I’ve been to and all of them have been really well organised. If you’re a subscriber to my newsletter you’ll have seen that I mentioned previous events: a gallery stroll, an after-hours gallery visit, the Summer Party at Century Club (where I took photos). All of these have been really enjoyable. I’ve met so many interesting people and artists. I intend to go to one of their events once a month, if I can keep that up. There are so many competing draws for our time. Here’s a link to the Nimi website if this is interesting to you. https://nimi.live/
WEDNESDAY AM
I was up and out with my camera by 8am so I thought this morning was going to be a Hero activity. I’m not the best at getting out early. Although I generally rise at around 7am every morning, getting showered, dressed and out is a different matter. I generally linger over a long cup of coffee, do some sudoku, watch YouTube on my topic of the moment (at the moment it’s sketching people) or get involved in necessary but time consuming housework (the bane of my life - but satisfying when it’s done).
I went for a walk locally. I headed first to the top of Stave Hill, which looks out over a wide circle of London, covering buildings such as the Shard, Docklands, City of London, Tower Bridge. All seen over the treetops since the man-made hill sits in the middle of a wood.
Next I headed into the woods and was surprised by a sighting of moorhen chicks and by capturing some unexpected shots of ducklings. It’s amazing what appears when you sit still!
Lastly, I headed along the river.
I was really pleased with the shots I’d taken and I’d had a lovely time. However… when I got home and downloaded from my camera I wasn’t overly pleased with the quality. I’d left my long lens on the camera (70 - 300mm) from when I was taking the moon photos. What I’d forgotten though is that this lens has a Stabilizer switch. When you use it with a tripod, you turn the switch to OFF, because the tripod is already a stabiliser and it would cause a conflict. For hand held though, the stabiliser button should be set to ON. I hadn’t been using this lens much lately and I forgot to remind myself about that. Not one of my finest moments but these things happen. I find it’s best to beat myself up a little bit about mistakes like these, so that I remember next time. But not so much that I lose joy and confidence in what I’m doing, which after all is the most important thing. These were just random shots to keep my practice up so it didn’t matter. I’ll show them here for local interest only. I’ll return to one of the shots on a day with better light and a better sky. It’s the one with the red cranes in front of the City of London. I could use that in a series I’m working on right now.
At around 10 am I headed off to Tate Modern. Some homework we had been given on the course was to sketch in a gallery. I’ve never done this in my life before so I really wasn’t sure how I would feel about it. I had deliberated for weeks about what materials to use, even putting together my own little travel set of acrylic paints and water pots. In the end I decided that messing about with paint and water in a gallery wasn’t for me and I took an A5 sketchbook and a small set of Tombow water based brush pens and a few acrylic markers.
I had wanted for some time to see the Cage paintings by Gerhard Richter. They’re called that because he was listening to music by John Cage as he painted. They’re six huge abstract paintings in their own room on Floor 2. I spent a fair bit of time looking at the paintings both from a distance and closely. Then I took photos. I looked for a spot to sketch from but I just couldn’t find a space in that room where I could comfortably fit in. So, I expanded my search to the room next door and found a compromise. There was a bench in the centre of that room and I could see three of the Cage paintings though the wide doorway. Even better, I could still hear the John Cage music that was playing.
The next hour passed very quickly. I thought I might feel self conscious - I didn’t because I was too engrossed. I thought people might look at me and what I was doing - I have no idea if they did because I was only looking at the paintings occasionally and my sketchbook constantly. I thought I might be interrupted by people talking to me - I was obviously engrossed so I’ve no idea if anyone was even tempted to - but they didn’t. All in all I loved the experience. I felt inspired by the paintings and the music and tried my best to put that feeling into what I was creating. I found that as I layered my drawing more and more, I channelled my inner Gerhard Richter who created his paintings by laying down and scraping across countless layers and colours. Even the mix of water colour and acrylic worked for me as the acrylic marks dried and were baked in while the water based marks were movable and mixable.
The end result showed up some fantastic textures of matte and sheen and had a richness I hadn’t expected. I’ll definitely try this type of work again, probably with acrylics only and at home.
Below are my photos of five of the Cage paintings and one for scale, followed by my sketch inspired by them.
After I’d finished my sketch and let it dry I noticed I just had time to join one of the Tate’s guided tours. This one was titled The Artist and Society and it was taking place in the same area I had just been in. I thought it would be fantastic if the guide covered the Cage paintings but unfortunately she didn’t. It was still a very good tour though and covered artists including Kasimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, Lucio Fontana, and Hedda Sterne. I found the painting NY, NY No. X inspirational so I took a photo of that along with some others.
Hedda Sterne, NY, NY No. X, 1948, Oil on canvas
Now it was lunchtime so I hopped on the bus home and prepared to paint a second layer of my painting in the afternoon.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this run through of 2 days in my life.
I try to keep positive in the face of any setbacks and deal with them in a practical way. Here are my plans to deal with the down moments I’ve written about.
I realised from my failed attempts to draw people and create fashion sketches that it’s something I’d love to be able to do, so when I was at the Tate I bought a book about figure drawing and I’ve started to work through the examples.
I’ve added an action in my notebook to test my external remote trigger at home and try to figure out why it froze my camera settings so that hopefully I don’t have that issue ever again.
On a practical note, next time I’m out at sunset I’m going to spread the Jungle Formula more liberally. The mosquitos were mobbing around us as it got dark and although my feet and legs were untouched, I found two bites on my shoulders the next morning.
I just have to train myself to check the switches on each lens (to be fair there are very few) before I use it to ensure the settings are fit for the current purpose. It’s not unknown for small switches to be nudged when I’m taking them in and out of their cases - so it does need to be an on the spot check.
Where I’ve had successes, I quickly celebrate them and try to build those into whatever I’m going to try next.
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