New paintings and regular art updates.
Our prompt from band of sketchers today was wood, so instead of drawing some brown furniture I decide to draw the trees outside including a pear tree, buddliea, pine tree and other trees, lots of wood. Our garden is a thicket! I hope you can see it OK, lots of leaves. The pears on the tree are growing larger every day. X
Auntysocial.wordpress.com is asking for a design for her old piano keys, 88 of them, because she’s dismantled her old upright piano. The keys are black and white (over 100 year old ivory). There are photos on her page of what other people have done. I’ve tried to draw something after failing abysmally on a drawing app that let’s you draw circles but not spirals. Anyway this is wonky but I thought some wall art, a square shaped white panel, and with a spiral or two of keys on it, plus some musical notes painted on it. A bit random…. I don’t know.
Playing with ArtRage oils, another app I like to use. I haven’t drawn with it for a while. It’s a free app on android (you can get the ro version with lots of other tools for a price). I like the fact that you can turn up the metallic effects from zero to 100%. There are four brush types. A dry brush and everlasting oils are two of the options. You can also change the size of the brush tools. Maybe it can be a bit fiddly to work with but it’s interesting to use and has a different look to most of the other drawing aps out there.
If you know of other apps, let me know. I want to find other options for drawing.
I mmust have been feeling cheerful when I did these paintings plus a batik picture of some fish. The first bottle oven painting is an attempt to do a clarice cliff design. If I did it now I would make the building more curved. The batik is sort of a Pices idea. The dragonfly was an interesting compositon and the half bottle oven is meant to be mirrored by blue sky or water in a canal. It is slightly remenicent of a yin yang symbol. The exhibition was held at the warehouse at Etruria industrial museum at Etruria, Stoke-on-Trent three years ago. At the moment we cannot use the building because of covid19.
I was talking to a fellow artist about drawing and painting glass. We discussed whether it has a blue tinge like water but I disagreed. I suggested he looked at the reflection on glass. Sometimes glass is tinted slightly, uranium glass for instance is yellowish, I said I thought it depended on what is added to it when it’s manufactured. I think if you were to put a glass and a plastic bottle next to each other as an exercise and draw what you see you would probably notice stronger reflections on the glass. Also look at shadows, glass, though usually transparent, throws a shadow…instead of using blue to define it I said try using a bit of grey. Observation is very important.
She was going to put them on chains for me, then covid19 happened and she got a protected job so I couldn’t visit. Finally it looks like I might be able to get them back? And what happens, the infection rate is going up again!
I hope things improve soon for everyone.
Next month we would probably have been holding a Barn dance in aid of the Penkhull Mystery play (that didn’t happen in July). We would also have started rehearsals for the Penkhull panto, both events, ( the mystery play and the panto) had big audiences. Now our government has decided to cut the number of people who can live in England down to six both inside and out. No more crowds. Sad….
Which do you prefer? I’ve used a friends photo and duplicated it as it was a interesting image. These are a couple of the resulting ‘layouts’. I do not intend to use these for anything other than an example, so I hope my friend will forgive me. If there is a problem I will delete the photo or use a stock photo to create a similar effect.
Todays challenge was to draw ‘glass’. I decided to do something colourful and as I like experiments, I drew in my Sketch app.
I tried to build up layers of colour using the spray paint tool first of all, then an eraser for the label and then paint brush tools, fountain pen and a text tool. It’s a bit wonky donkey, but I don’t think it looks too bad. I used a stylus to try and make neater marks. I might do a few more like this. I’m enjoying these challenges.
Sketchfu was another site I drew at. More sophisticated than Youdraw. It closed when the owners decided to send more time on another website. Lots of artists drew there. I made many friends and we did various challenges like copying photos of objects, but I also liked the freedom. You could also add to other people’s drawings. So it was almost like a joint animation. Like everything else in the world, things change, they never stay the same.
Mallaband-Brown