Healthcare at home

Pencil and pencil crayon in Moleskine sketchbook

Pencil, pencil crayon and ink pen in Moleskine sketchbook.

Pencil and pencil crayon in Moleskine sketchbook.

Pencil, pencil crayon and brush marker

Pencil crayon, watercolour pencil crayon and sanguine Pitt pen.

My husband having his long chemotherapy session today. It's the tenth in a cycle of twelve, so nearing the end. There's this amazing nursing service that administers chemo at home, where patients can feel more comfortable and at ease. I always give him lunch on a tray while the poison's being pumped into him and he talks politics with the nurse.

I love those plastic pouches they use for the drip infusion: they are mysterious and scary, but at the same time they seem like pouches of miracle-working potion. They catch the light and you can't quite distinguish between surface and depth: they seem to be constantly in motion.  You can see the liquid slowly making its way into the body. I've drawn them a few times here, and also taken lots of photos over the course of the treatment.

I've never liked using markers, but there are such fabulous ones available, now that illustration and graphic novels and manga have become so popular. I couldn't resist the three-for-the-price-of-two sale yesterday at the local art shop, and bought two different tones of the same grey and an umbery brown. They're probably a bit too flat and bold for me, but they are very seductive to use. I am especially taken by the ghost of a drawing that comes through on the other side of the paper, a bit like the shroud of Turin picking out the salient features of the underlying form, so in the last drawing, I just used pencil crayon to trace the bits that had seeped through the page before, definitely a kind of cheating-drawing. I think I will take that idea of re-using the reverse side of the paper and try it in my studio drawing, see what happens.