New paintings and regular art updates.
Nine if us from the Orme art group collaborated to do this copy of a Cezanne still life. Each had a chosen oblong to copy. Mine was the sixth. With part of a peach and a glass.
Interesting how it turned out. I used permanent markers and a bit of watercolour paint. My colour pallette was limited by the colours of the felt pens. The other tricky thing was pattern matching, getting the fruit to line up and the colours to match. I think we did a good job. Wouldn’t mind doing another one. X
Four faces on a black and white pattern I made on the phone. Each face was drawn by my finger on the screen. I definitely think I have a style that I draw in. Not anything recognisable like anime. Just my way of doing things. They say though, that there’s nothing new under the sun. So I wonder if there are any artists that do this kind of thing. Maybe it’s a bit too unfinished but you don’t learn unless you try different things.
X
I posted this and other photos to my Instagram page and a friend commented that they looked like views out of an airplane window of the sea with islands in it.
I had concentrated on trying to see animals in the image. I can see a snarling bears head at the top left of this one for instance. But it reminded me of a holiday in Dorset one year. Driving up over the hills of the county, just before we dropped down towards Weymouth on the coast, the sky looked like mountainous islands with sea, bays and inlets running through them. I wish I’d been able to take a photo…
The sky had been a pale wash of pastel colours, the sun was setting, but because we were heading due south its glare was catching the sides of the clouds, they were lit up with gold on one side and greys on the other. The ‘sea’ was all pale pinks and blues. If we had not spent all day driving I would have pulled over. The image faded as we headed towards the caravan site, but it was the precursor of a lovely week away. Maybe I can find some old snaps of the places we visited.
I often look at cloudscapes and see landscapes.
x
In February I was painting scenery and props for our local pantomime, Aladdin.
We were acting in front of about 140 people for four performances. One on Thursday and Friday, and a double performance including a matinee on Saturday. To think just a couple of weeks later we were in lockdown. I saw hundreds of people over those few days, and then no one for three months except on the way to and back from the shops.
I wish I could go back in time? Go back to a time where there was laughter. Fun, silly jokes, time to be with friends. Life was much less worrying then, despite global warming and pollution! I wonder what will happen when things return to normal if they do?
I took another look at this post about map reading and suddenly saw a cat. I’ve written about finding things in wallpaper, or ink blots or all sorts of different things including the front and back of cars. Grilles on cars can look like grinning mouths, headlights like eyes. I love seeing animals and faces and objects in clouds. Sometimes it drives me mad when I see something over and over again. Once seen, never forgotten. Life is strange, the mind is stranger.
X
I don’t know when I did this, probably three or four years ago. It’s a combination of three apps, ArtRage oils, sketcher free and layout. I drew the metallic looking pattern first, then added the spirals and finally divided and mirrored the images.
I probably used a photo editor too. I’m not sure.
The feeling I get from making these gives me great pleasure. I can’t explain, but it takes me out of myself.
X
I was doing a couple of commissions of Etruria flint and bone mill. I had done one painting and a couple of people liked it and wanted copies. This is when I started using long thin canvases. It makes landscapes more interesting I think. Is it like letterbox TV? I don’t know. I’m hoping I can get back to doing things like this when we get back to something like normality.
X
Quick sketches of figures while I sat on a roundabout in the park yesterday. I added a little dog, sitting next to one of them. And an older female figure stooped over. Our project this week at college was to do various things, including drawing a person walking. I must do a better job, but these were a couple of minutes each, max.
They could be neat and tidy, but you can’t nail people down to make them still when you try and draw them.
X
Patterned background, created digitally, with a figure of a seated woman added. I like playing with pattern, seeing what I can find hidden in the depths..
I added dark lines then shading and lightened areas to give the figure a bit of definition. I guess it’s a little more abstract than I normally draw. I changed the hue in it a couple of times to. Making it more green and then more red. I enjoy experimenting with art.
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Not my favourite challenge, but I looked out of the window and saw various triangles. I rearranged the clothes on the airer so they made definite triangles, and the coats on the cupboard were hanging down in a triangle. I left the standard lamp out because it didn’t help the composition. The acrylic paint I used is quite opaque and as the group I’m in is called Urban sketchers Stoke-on-Trent I felt the sketchy feel was OK. If I had been doing a ‘proper’ painting I would have done a more realistic, painterly I ture. But I was concentrating on the triangles….
Mallaband-Brown