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….
I joined a site and happily drew there for years. The site tools were simple to draw with, a colour picker, variable sized pens and opacity, lovely, no layers to mess with. I and many others enjoyed the site which saw a steady rise in use…
The problem as it got too popular. What was meant to be an art site got a lot of attention from bloggers who would write stories under the drawings. The moderators found it difficult to control, and the owners, who had started up another site, were giving less and less attention to it.
I enjoyed drawing challenges there, some of which are shown above. Honing my digital drawing skills. I was happy with what I was doing and made many friends. Sadly though, the site was eventually closed. The owners tried to transfer people across to the new site, but it had too many tools, there were lots of things to do, but the site did not have the same feel as the old place. It seemed aimed at a younger audience. Eventually it too closed, to reappear as a different site where you could search for your old drawings but they were hard to find, and you coukd not add new work.
Luckily I had downloaded some of them before this happened. As with other sites, be careful to back up your drawings or they may be lost.
