New paintings and regular art updates.
I saw this gorgeous large bowl for sale today. The diameter was about 2 foot. The colours and pattern were right up my street. But…..
£200! Beautiful but too expensive for my tastes.
It was one if many bowls and pots for sale, including a tapas dish. It’s nice to look at things like that, but you don’t have to buy.
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I was going to get up early today and going on a community walk along the local canal, but I got up late. I also considered going to an Urban Sketchers event at the Chatterley Whitfield nature reserve. But again I was too late. In the end we went to the Villas which is just down the road. There was an event called art at the Villas. The show was almost at the top of the road on the right hand side. The road is unadopted so go carefully driving up there. We parked at the bottom and walked.
The house we went in and its garden were full of interesting art. There were prints, original tee shirts, paintings, ceramics and a warm welcome. They were also accepting donations for charity. If you feel like visiting its in the Villas up the hill on the right off London Road, Oakhill , Stoke-on-Trent.
Since I was there and had missed other sketching opportunities I did a quick drawing of the garden and summerhouse in the distance.
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One thing I have got to do is paint some images of minton tiles. These were made in their millions over many years and can often be found in the hallways of town houses especially in Stoke-on-Trent. People are enthusiastic about them even now and get excited about them when they find them in old houses.
There were apparently 12 original designs which are documented in a little book called touching history by Hans van Lemmen and Bret Shah. This is available through StokeYourGratitude.org.uk #StokeYourGratitude
Today was all about making and painting things for the Penkhull Mystery Play this year. I reused two boxes from previous plays. I was asked to paint them black and then to use gold and yellow paint for the decoration.
The idea was to create boxes which would look like they had been decorated with Chinese lacquer. I didn’t know whether the idea would work, but it seemed OK.
Other work to do include sticking paper plates together to make them strong enough to be passed between 50school children and painting two large papier machè birds that represent the birds on the willow pattern plate.
One box has a landscape on the top of it, the other has a circular coin like shape on the top.
I just watched a programme on TV about colours, one of which was blue. They showed the rock, Lapis Lazuli, which can only be found in a small number of places in the world including Afghanistan and California.
Lapis Lazuli was used as a paint pigment in paintings by artists like Titian. The rock is ground down to fine powder and then mixed with oil and wax to make oil paint. The resulting colour is called ultramarine and is a superb blue used in things like the blue paint in the robes of the virgin Mary in Titian’s paintings.
So how did Lapis Lazuli become blue? Sulphur rich rock, which was a pale grey brown was heated up 30 or 40 kilometres below the Earth’s surface. The intense heat and pressure apparently compresses the mineral and makes three atoms of Sulphur line up in each molecule. It is this geometry in the molecules that causes it to reflect pure blue light. (Sulphur is usually found in nature in a yellow, red, orange, brown or black form – the Volcanic moon of Jupiter, Io, is coloured by Sulphur).
Blue sky
Blue Sea.
Blue life.
Blue me
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Drawn while waiting for a friend, the cake stands are bright pink and full of sugary delights that I avoided. I had strawberries and cream and a fruit smoothie which was made of smooshed frozen berries and very cold! This was a 20 minute drawing so didn’t go for any details. The woman walked along to the till as I was drawing so fitted her in at that end. Since urban sketchers last weekend I’m doing more of this kind of thing.
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I’m trying to do at least one drawing a day, this is actually the second picture I did but I’m posting it because it’s slightly different. Firstly I used a blue glitter brush pen to draw one of my cats. Then for slight shading I used a plain yellow brush pen. When it was dry I decided to use a 0.6 tip fine line black pen to draw in darker areas. I then drew lines over the darker areas and decided to do the lighter ones too. Finally after adding the lines in the background I drew a line round the edges of the blue and yellow areas and picked out any patches of white that had been missed with the blue ink at the start of the process. I didn’t take any work in progress photos. The drawing is in a Windsor and Newton sketch pad, heavy weight wire-o, A6 size. 50 sheets 170gsm /80lb.
Some sketches from our short break. Including two doodles when it was to wet and dark and the TV was on the blink. My hubby reading, a sketch inside the cabin, a drawing of Fountains Abbey in the rain, the view out of the window, and finally trees which I coloured in.
Sketching keeps me occupied and gives me something to do when I want to be artistic.
It doesn’t cost much to draw, you can use a biro and the back of an envelope. You have to try and stay dry but it’s good to get out and about.
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Who knew so many people would get together and draw for three days in mostly very wet conditions. Here are a few more photos of the event on Sunday in Hanley.
Art is important, it is creative, it shows us new things, new ideas, new ways of looking at things. It helps understanding of the complex as well as the simple.
I think it should be compulsory to do some sort of art at school (well I would), but nowadays the core curriculum seems to have shrunk without the breadth of knowledge of the past. In the meantime dumbing down seems to be the norm.
Ah life, so strange. Thank goodness for art.
I managed to delete photos from my WordPress account so I can now post new ones. Thanks to my friend for helping and explaining how to do it.
I deleted over 10%, so if you look back at some of my old posts there may not be images to accompany them. At least it means I can avoid upgrading my account and also save a bit of money.
So… Posts and more posts to come
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Mallaband-Brown