New paintings and regular art updates.
I’ve decided not to do any more on this, called Tiger Lily. It’s just a bit of fun, something different, a cross between a green man and a cat. I could do more. I think the colours are probably too confused. I could keep messing with it but I’m busy trying to finish other paintings as well, like my poppy painting….
I seem to be using a lot of cadmium red at the moment! The contrasting green is pthalo green which is such a deep emerald colour.
Onwards and upwards hopefully.
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Sparkle, shine, glitter
I was playing with one of my phone picture editing apps and came across something that pixelates in dots not squares.
I turned it into a black and white image, then added colours with a flood fill option in another app. 
I did more to it by using my phone editing suite. I went to the curves section which allows you to adjust the colours and brightness and adjusted it to make it more interesting.
I’ve ended up with a dotty abstract.
Something more abstract. Playing with colour and pattern. All I started with was a photo of the wallpaper on the ceiling. I edited it to change the colours, then added a few coloured strokes in my sketcher app. Then I changes the hue in the phones photo editing suite.
I wish I felt well enough to paint, but little steps….
This is a painting called frost woman I think. I started doing it as a demonstration at the exhibition. Someone said she didn’t know how I do it. How do I get things looking right so quickly and someone else said she would need to spend ages working out a design. But I admire both of their work. I guess we are all different. I love patterns and work well with them. And yet struggle with other things. I’m not neat, I don’t really do clean straight lines. I’m often messy, my eyesight isn’t what it was and I don’t think my concentration is as good as it used to be.
But I love painting.
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I posted a couple of photos of this painting a few days ago but I wasn’t happy with it. I was going to change it but didn’t know what was going to happen to it. I had ideas but as I worked on it I couldn’t figure out whether they would work or not. One side was complicated, the other to simple. How to balance the sides but not paint over the whole thing?
The solution was to paint over a lot of it, but allow the background to show through. I tried to go for an exploded boxes side on the left of the picture and a more curved pattern on the right. Also I added more green and blue to the right. Finally I added some metallic paint on the left to tone down the black I had used to paint the box shapes just on one side of each box/object. Anyway the cat seems to like it!
We have an art challenge at Spode studios to come up with an art work which follows the theme “transition” or “transitions”.
I would normally come up with a realistic painting but I’m also toying with something more abstract. These are initial digital drawings, working on the transition from grainy to smooth, straight to curvy, and changes of colour.
I might try and turn one of these into a large painting. In a way it’s also making me think about changing my work practice from quite a straightforward way of working into something more involved.
Watch thus space for possible updates….
I might even enter something into the exhibition….
But then you probably guessed that….
My favourite colour as a child was red, not pink….but hot , bright red. Some people say red is orange when it is bright, but I disagree.
I’m lucky to have full colour vision (even if it is a bit blurry) my other senses might not be so good but I love the bright cerulean blue of the sky. I love emerald green..Orange oranges, the brown, purple, greens of tree trunks…
Where would I be without the varied colours of the sea. Grey’s, blues, aquatic turquoise, even muddy orange when there has been a storm that drags soil or sand out into the water.
Yellows that make my heart sing. When I first moved into my own home I remember painting a room bright yellow. Like walking into pure sunlight.
Black and deep purple give contrast to stark white. But white and black can be warm or cold, just add a bit of red or blue to change the hue…
I love metallics too. I put them into my paintings to add interest…
So ask me what colour I hate? Not one, none, zero…. x
