New paintings and regular art updates.
A previous digital drawing of a fence against a colourful background. My Sketch app on my phone has silhouettes of trees and plants that I rarely use. I also added extra texture and overlays in Photodirector. These are a couple of the art apps I have on my phone that I use frequently and don’t want to remove if I have to get the Jetpack app. Am I irritated? Yes. Must stop going on about it. Creativity isn’t important after all is it (sulks)…. Sorry!
My digital drawing of the whirlpool galaxy. Visible through powerful telescopes, wouldn’t it be amazing if it was visible to the naked eye?
Why is our galaxy, the Milky Way, so faint? Partly because of light pollution which drowns out the hundreds of thousands of stars visible in a dark sky area, and partly because there are dust lanes n the way of the view to the centre of the galaxy. Plus if you live in the Northern Hemisphere your view is out of the galaxy. If you live in the Southern Hemisphere your view is towards the centre of the galaxy, plus the small and large Magellanic clouds.
A cloudy sky (with an odd dog shape- I’m not changing it) flys above a park. The grass is shaded by the long shadows of trees. The sun is bright, but starting to set. I used various techniques taught to us by Jo Watson, an artist who comes out and teaches charcoal workshops.
Most of the group used images supplied by Jo, but a few of us chose our own images. This drawing was based on a photo of Baker Street Park in Penkhull, Stoke-on-Trent.
I really loved learning about charcoal, I’ve used it before, but not been in control of it! ❤️
I decided to free up a bit of space on my phone yesterday as I was on over 90% full. I really need to get more memory on my phone as I have over 3,000 images. The trouble is when I optimise and delete photos it resets the date on them so sometimes they all reorder themselves and jump around in my gallery until they settle down. Then I end up with a lot of duplicated photos and I have to go in and delete the duplications, and I also try and edit the others and try and delete more of the ones I don’t like. I hope you don’t have these problems!
The featured image is a painting of frost on canvas where I edited it in a filter to change the colours. It just popped up in my photo gallery.
A stag and thistles against a Scottish Saltire. The Penkhull Panto is not having scenery this year except for some smaller A2 panels that I painted a few years ago of various scenes from around the world. I offered to paint something representing Scotland and found various images of Scottish jewellery depicting Stags and Thistles in a semi celtic design. This is my interpretation of the idea. The blue and white of the saltire is a good background to the design. I used two A1 boards glued together for strength (£10) and it is painted in acrylics with some silver metallic pen highlights. I hope they like it.
I asked for a photo of my beach painting from the lady who bought it (it went to the person who had commissioned it and I had forgotten to take a picture). She was really happy with it. I tried to get that feeling of water washing on and out, flowing over the sand. A few dark rocks sit in the bottom right hand corner and I really tried to get bright sunny colours into it. I found the blue hard to get right, so I used a turquoise hue to get that marine feeling.
When I used to paint murals I did a series of cartoon characters for a friends son. This was Fun to do! This was done about twelve years ago. I enjoyed painting it. I remember using acrylic on the walls, with a matt varnish on top.
Sometimes I just have to create something different. I don’t do many paintings of abstracts, I find them difficult to do. I don’t want to have to write a long explanation of what the painting means. I love all sorts of art, but it’s hard to pin down what would be my favorite. This autumn /spring painting is acrylic on canvas. With colours that represent the seasons. The shapes are meant to represent middle age, complexity, confusion, a city scape, and the spring is simple nature. See I said I hate describing what I’m doing, and yet that’s exactly what I’ve just done! Maybe I should do a Winter/summer one?
I do love sharing this painting of one of my old cats. It’s about twenty or twenty five years old. Just after we moved to our current house. She used to love sitting behind the flowerpot at the top of the stairs. By the way the weeping fig grew to five foot tall before we had to rehomed it because it got too big for the space in the kitchen where it had to be moved too because it got too big for the windowledge. Thank goodness the cat didn’t grow that big!
Got a nice surprise this morning, I’ve sold another small painting (long and thin). It had been for sale at the Arts and Minds Gallery at Harper Street in Middleport, Stoke-on-Trent. As usual it’s lovely to feel that someone has taken it into their heart.
This was a playful piece. I started by painting some weeds and rushes, and only decided to add a bird, this Heron, because it fitted in with the shape of the canvas.
Next? I might paint some gentle landscapes or flowers, but play with the style again, not forgetting the industrial heritage of the area.
Mallaband-Brown