A friends exhibition

Here are a couple of photos of my friend, Alice Thatcher’s, exhibition on at 118, Church Street, Stoke, Stoke-on-Trent. It’s on from today, and is made up of peices of porcelain made by placing thin layers of the porcelain clay on paper and then firing it.

The exhibition is called “Porcelain and Paper”. I’m not sure when it’s on till but it will be visible through the windows of the building until the show ends. The pieces are delicate and fragile. They are displayed in various ways along with drawings of them.

 

Parquet

_20181210_211502

This is some old flooring which may be tiled. I don’t think it’s actual parquet flooring which is a type of wood block flooring. Usually laid in a herringbone pattern. The floor is then buffed to a shiny finish. I saw this floor somewhere in the recent past, and it reminded me.

We had a floor like this at the gym at school, and then in the life drawing room at college. I remember painting and drawing many models there and trying to draw the floor pattern from lots of different directions. It made the pictures more interesting and once you got the hang of it quite easy to draw.

Anyway I was doing quite a bit of life drawing early last year but things got busy. But I’m going to try and go back. I also want to learn some new drawing techniques. I think they have parquet on the floor in the hall where they do life drawing. Things do come round full circle.

X

New Blue

 

I have finally got back in the studio and started a new painting. It’s called Jupiter in Blue and will be part of an exhibition at Spode called “an Exhibition of Blue” from 1st February 2019.

The painting will be for sale so if anyone is interested in it please drop me a line!

The price will be £300. Its 24×30 inches so its a decent size.

Better get on with it.

X

IMG_20190109_174803_382.jpg

1st layer done.

Combining drawing apps

 

The first three drawings are based on a drawing done in a kaleidoscope app. Then I changed them in picsart using the stretch/spiral tool and then the colour curves tool which allows you to change the hues and tones.

The fourth drawing background was done in ArtRage oils which is a free Google play store app. It was then drawn over with sketcher free which allows you to draw with different brushes. I used the ribbon option to draw a masklike face. The fifth drawing was a quick sketch of a face, drawn in a sketching app. In this case I used picsarts colour curves to change the levels of colour, then a stretching app to change the shapes. Finally I used a tool to create an embossed feel and then the mask option to layer up lighting effects.

I’m using my phone a lot of the time and I tend to forget there are more options on my tablet. Then today I realised that there was a drop down menu on the masks option, so I found a whole new section of the app to play with.

What I guess I’m saying is don’t be afraid to play with drawing apps, you learn more when you do, and you can come up with some really interesting ideas.

I used digital art as a sketchbook. I may not use it in the analogue world of oainting, but it fascinates me.

X

One Whole year here!

sketch-1546537007336IMG_20190103_102720_877

It doesn’t feel like a year! I’ve posted over 600 blog pages and over 10,000 views….. How did that happen?

I do varied posts, from art to poetry, small short stories and hopefully funny stories. I didn’t think I could write so much and such varied things.

I think it’s worth being on here and as long as I continue to enjoy it, and don’t get too foxed by things like blocks and the new Gutenberg editor, I will carry on blogging.

X

Angela’s glass

I bought this lovely handkerchief glass vase after going to a friend’s glass workshop. My partner and I also made ones of our own. I will try and take photos of them.

This peice has graded blue colours from dark to light and smaller square pieces. The pieces of glass are placed on a plain glass layer and melted in a kiln till they fuse. The resulting square of glass is then placed over a cylindrical mold and heated again until it slumps again into a handkerchief shape. This peice was a present for a friend. Like all crafts, glass is something you have to learn  I’m really glad I attended the workshop and would definitely go again, although I don’t know if I could ever get this good.

X

Peace

sketch-1546350736315

I have been thinking what I would like to hear more of this year and the answer has to be peace.

If more people turned round and decided not to fight, that fighting does not resolve things, that negotiation is the way to go, then perhaps the human race could get somewhere.

If money was not spent on armaments then it could be used to sort out global climate change. The resources used to build planes and missiles could be used to make solar panels or build desalination stations.

Instead we seem to just push on regardless and want to destroy not improve relationships between peoples.

I would like to quote John Lennon

“give peace a chance” … …