New paintings and regular art updates.
Where does the cat sit?
On the fridge?
On the cupboard?
In the cupboard!
In the washing machine?
On your bed.
In the sink,
On you chair?
On the washing basket…..
On the windowledge?
In the flowerbed.
Behind a flowerpot?
Basically…
Wherever it wants to.!
As I sit quietly at home I’ve realised how good the weather has been, and how much blossom is on the cherry and pear trees. And then, my friends have all been posting photos of blossom near them. Clouds of pink and white.
I will try and get a photo against a blue sky, but I just wanted to share this. The bees have been buzzing so they are happy.
I was thinking how the blossom comes out before the leaves. Is that to make it easier for insects to pollinate the flowers?
Now we need rain, it’s been dry for most of the month. Without it the farmers, who are struggling with lack of workers, will struggle even more. Time will tell…. Cherry’s and pears will ripen, hopefully.
In the meantime the Russian vine we planted a few years ago has started taking over a couple of parts of the garden. It ‘rushes’ along, growing fast, and wrapping itself around everything. My arms hurt after spending a couple of hours trying to cut it back.
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That was today’s USK challenge, draw something that adds flavour. Trouble was I’m getting low on tasty stocks, the strongest thing in the cupboard was English Mustard.
There was vinegar, soup, custard powder, a hot drink mix, pilchards, sardines and tuna in there together with the mustard. I think there were probably some lentils in there too.
Funny what you realise you’ve got. It should keep us going for a few more days.
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Sketch of new cherry blossom and old Ivy. It was black and white, drawn in uni pin 0.1,0.5, and 0.8 fine line black ink pens ( made by mitsubishi). On A4 paper. USK Stoke-on-Trent 30 day challenge. Day 27…. ! Really? Where has that gone?
Once I’d finished I decided to use a couple of green permanent markers to define where the ivy and other vegetation was. This had the effect of making the blossom more visible.
I’m pleased with the result. I hope the blossom all turns into cherries. We get them from the bottom half of the tree, the birds get the top half!
I just thought I would show you a close-up of the apple I drew today, so you can see the effect of layering up pencil crayon and permanent marker, black ink pen, and charcoal pencil. I enjoyed using fine lines to define the shadows. I was going to leave a patch if white paper as a highlight on the apple, but when I looked at it, it was to white. So I used orange, red and pink permanent markers to try and make the apple stand out. Using different colours and textures is really exciting, it makes the image less flat. But I’m not trying to make it 3d either.
These are a few pictures I took when I was at college. They are pictures of objects I considered to turn into still lives. I finally did a painting based on the shiny plastic melanin? These pictures were taken almost forty years ago in my studio. The final one is oil paint on board. In one corner if you look closely is the painting of a hill covered in terraced houses that I did a copy of recently.
It’s good finding an old sketchbook with old hotis. It reminds me of what I was doing then. I also found pictures of old friends. I might post a couple of photos of them.
Stay safe and do Art!
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A forty year old photo of a river I took when I was young.
It reminded me to calm down, try and relax, maybe ignore the news for a couple of days and get some rest.
I’ve also had to leave some of the emails I get. I can’t keep up with all the notifications of news. I want to read everyone’s posts, but I have responsibilities that I need to take care of. Even in this mad situation you still have to cope.
So anyway. I hope everyone is doing OK. It’s hard to think of people stuck in their homes. Not allowed out. In lockdown. I imagined that the world was linked and that people would feel each others pain or loneliness. But of course that isn’t true. Otherwise when people in different countries went through famine or disease we would know and help them… But sadly it doesn’t work like that.
USK Stoke day 26 challenge. Eating fruit. So I drew this wrinkly apple, balanced on my easel, then ate it… Not the easel, but the apple.
Drawn with coloured pencil crayons, charcoal stick, black ink pen and permanent marker pens.
I’m now hungry….
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Another one of my digital drawings on sketchfu. Probably drawn in 2013 before the site closed down. A lot of this is done by using opacity and transparency. There were about seven sizes of pens on the website and a large colour palette and a colour picker and erasers that I think had a varied transparency.
When you do something like this you have to build up from a basic background, layering details, adding more and smaller detail as I go along.
Observation is important. I can excuse slight mistakes, but I try and be as accurate as possible.
I’m interested in astronomy so being able to draw from beautiful images is a real pleasure. I think this either came from a stock image, or somewhere like NASA or ESA, but it’s so long ago…
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I might be submitting some little black and red drawings to a group exhibition. It’s not something I’ve done before. The work is meant to be two inches square with it being in ink and on white paper.
After drawing the two images on the left side of the paper, I realised there was not enough white and I had used too dark a red in the first one.
I tried to draw the two patterns again, but they didn’t come out as well as I’m still quite tired from staying up too late last night. What do you think? Are they interesting enough?
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