New paintings and regular art updates.
Today’s #bandofsketchers prompt was history. I drew Dorothy Wyndlow Pattison, better known as Sister Dora (16 January 1832 – 24 December 1878), she was a 19th-century Anglican nun and a nurse who worked in Walsall, Staffordshire. She nursed miners after mine disasters. She is known as Walsall’s Florence Nightingale. I remember this statue in the town centre in the 1970’s. One of a very few statues of women in the UK. She died of breast cancer aged 46.
This Saturday, around eight artists will be exhibiting at the Whitfield Community Centre, Whitfield Avenue, Newcastle under Lyme, Staffordshire. Eleven till Four.
It should be good. Crafts and jewellery as well as paintings and drawings will be for sale. It will be interesting to see how many people come out. Hope the weather is fine. I will be wearing a mask, hope no one minds!
I’ve finished a couple of paintings today. Pretty much as soon as I finished my MA work I picked up a paintbrush again. I’m part of a group exhibition on Saturday and I wanted to finish some new work. Dragons have crept into a couple of the paintings. The one on the left is ‘dragon saucer’ and the right is ‘ulysses’. Illustration has seeped into my veins!
We visited Betley Court and walked around the bluebell woods. It’s a private property so it only opens twelve times a year so we were really lucky to get in today. We will go back! It’s on the road from Keele in Newcastle under Lyme towards Nantwich I think. Its in Staffordshire I think (but its really near Cheshire). Its a lovely place. I really love this Spring abundance.
Today the #bandofsketchers prompt was fruity. Its a bit ‘sketchy’ because I was trying to draw in a dark room and it was hard to get the colours right. The fruit were real but I made the bowl up. It’s meant to be oranges and lemons in a cornish blue and white bowl.
Series of digital finger paintings and photo edit to show how I created the eye drawing in my last post. I used artrage oils to start, then a flood fill in rainbow colours and a black pen and black flood fill in my sketch app. Finally added the texture with a style then grime option in Photodirector.
I decided to play with a previous drawing. It’s fascinating how you can rotate and reposition images in Instagram filters. You can make parts of the image recede or come forward. And if I’d wanted to I could have blurred the edges of the image. It also allows you to change the colours and contrast, shadows and brightness. Other apps allow you to do other things. The world is your oyster.
Portrait of a friends nephew. I’ve just started it using a dark grey pencil crayon. It needs some more work and I will try and include some of the background to make it more cohesive. I need to work on the shading. If I squint my eyes I can work out the tonal range. Clearly the forehead needs darkening on the left hand side. I’ve only got today and tomorrow to finish it!
Links, complications, colours
Convoluted beginnings
And endings.
Thinking about life
Memories bubble out
Like air filtering
Through a spring
Expanding and bursting.
Lights spark on my minds surface
Like old popping flash bulbs
On a box brownie camera
Or captured as polaroids
Held in gel
An album of my thoughts.
One of the patterns I created for my final major project. It was to introduce the idea of abstract art to children within a story book. Each page in black and white tells the story. The opposite page is based on patterns in the environment or the scale patterns of dragon scales. Colours in juxtaposition to strong black and white figurative drawings. If you follow my blog you will know about the book I’m thinking of publishing. I know I’m going on about it but I feel passionate about it.
Mallaband-Brown