
I’ve been playing with a sketching app on my tablet, I haven’t used it very often, so the results are very experimental, I just tried as many pens and brushes as I could, some of them are difficult to work out. I decided to do something bold!
New paintings and regular art updates.

I’ve been playing with a sketching app on my tablet, I haven’t used it very often, so the results are very experimental, I just tried as many pens and brushes as I could, some of them are difficult to work out. I decided to do something bold!

A feathery or furry picture in blues. I would like to set up a service where I can print things off for people, but I’ve always been a bit nervous of etsy and shopify. I almost dipped my toe in last weekend, but the cost of it, in these difficult times, put me off.
It’s difficult to find a balance between art and selling. I really think I need a manager. At the moment I do things myself. That’s the reality, I have to try and get things right……
I did have contact with a company a few years ago who offered to take my designs and pay me 25%. But when I looked into their practices I found out they were slow paying artists and the things they made were sometimes of a oor quality. That was another thing that put me off.
I got my paintings up at the Brampton museum and art gallery now until the 10th November. I’m part of a group exhibition with fellow artists from the Orme Art group based in Newcastle-under-Lyme.
I’m quite happy that they have hung my Mars painting upside down! After all in space there is no right way up! The art is along a corridor in the museum but they are well displayed and lit. If you are around you can always take a look. It’s at the Brampton museum and art gallery in Newcastle-under-Lyme .
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What do you see?
Planets and comets?
Spiralling out of control?
Or a vegetable sliced through?
A seed pod?
Peas in a pot?
A strange roulette wheel?
Abstract art?
Cheerleader pom poms?
Or just random noise?

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….