New paintings and regular art updates.
Thursdays #bandofsketchers prompt was new. OK, I struggled with this, then drew a new self portrait using monoprint paper and silver foil, then adding my face as if in a cracked mirror. The mouth is down, but that’s what happens to me when I’m relaxed!
It’s been raining here for days! From when I happened to say to a friend at the end of April, ‘we really need some rain, the farmers are worried they haven’t had enough for their crops’.
Be wary of what you ask for.
Now I remember the old rhyme we used to say when it was always raining ‘rain, rain, go away, come again another day’! It has poured down so hard today you can hear it thrumming on the kitchen roof and battering the windows… Enough! I want to go for a walk!
With a bag? She was staring at me, getting into my mind, so I decided to do a collage with her. This seems to be my creative ‘go to’ at the moment. Photo, then draw onto monoprinted paper, copying the photo. Two holes for her orange eyes. Then stick the paper down. Next post it notes for the bag that holds a couple I’d packs of felt pens. I cut out shapes then drew over it to give it more shading. Finally the mat… Another bit of monoprint. It’s hard to cut out the negative shape of the cat, and the mat is red and green, but I wanted it to stand out from the cat and my red and green pens have just about run out, so I used pink and what was meant to be a pale blue instead. It’s a bit scruffy, I didn’t have enough pattern to extend across the whole page so part of the mat is just coloured in. Anyway it was fun to do. Ignore the date by the way, I hadn’t done anything on the 18th so I filled in the gap.
I doodled a tree in felt pens (four of them held together for the greens, and three for brown and grey), then I added a black patterned monoprint for the fence and clouds. #bandofsketchers prompt…. Catching up..
I like painting bottle ovens on long thin canvases and I tend to use the shape of the side to make almost a yin yang curve. I might add some stars to the swirling sky. I’ve used mainly reds browns and oranges for the brickwork on the kiln. I need to go over the dark mortar and add some shading to the kiln to give it more shape. Acrylic on canvas.
I decided to use bits of post-it notes and monoprint and combine them in a tangle of colours. Do they link up with each other? It is a representation of my MA land. When you work on a college course there is so much to absorb and take in. Lots of information that needs to cross the book/ brain barrier via your eyes. The ever expanding reading list tries to force you to take in knowledge, but it’s not always easy to sift the relevant from the irrelevant. The clarity of words is not always there. I try to write clearly when I’m blogging, but if you have to take a dictionary with you when you try and read a piece of information, then you have to ask whether the author is being elitist.
Other problems with online courses are the lack of face to face contact. You can try and have zoom meetings or their equivalent. But it does feel sometimes like you are working in a vacuum. My desk is tiny, my pc and keyboard and screen take up about 75% of the space. It’s hard to find enough space to work in. My sketchbooks are getting smaller in proportion to the increasing number of them. So much drawing over the last year!
Looking in through the door to the left side of the studio. I’ve got a lot of work that has been exhibited, I just need to sell some of it! I woukd like to find a good art site to sell my work for a reasonable amount (not an on line auction, or on the other hand, an expensive and exclusive site). I just want these to go to good homes.
Have been offered a space in an exhibition for local artists in June. That will be fun! It’s been a whole year since I’ve dealt with the public face to face. I feel quite nervous about it.
I managed to do a bit more on this work in progress today. It feels a bit closer to the original. Getting the colours to blend into each other is hard and although I’m using thin glazes the acrylic paint goes off very quickly. The eyes are a little better, but the mouth might be slightly too smiley. I just need to scumble the paint a bit more to soften the tones into one another.
Small drawing of a heart that I drew on top of a bit of black monoprinting. I’d cut this section out of another bit to create a negative space for a portrait, I’ll post that drawing later. Done during a student led session that just finished tonight. Part of idea generation for the illustration course I’m doing.
One thing I do need to look at is fonts, it’s hard to draw them accurately and I struggle to copy them, and I didn’t have a particular font in mind, just the idea the letters should be red, I might try and make them look a bit more like blood with a fine ink pen.
Well, I’ve finally got back to my studio at spode! I started a small painting of a bottle oven, I think it’s going to have a Van Gogh style sky. I need to start getting some work done for a possible exhibition later in the year. I want to do work about the area, but with a bit of a twist. This is a canvas about two foot by eight inches? It will be acrylic on canvas once I’ve painted in the mortar for the brick work I will add colourful bricks. The sky will swirl with clouds and stars and there may be vegitation or a bit of foliage.
Mallaband-Brown