New paintings and regular art updates.
#bandofsketchers prompt for Thursday was Wind. With the wind that’s been blowing lately if there are any dandelion heads they will all be bald by now! I tried to give the effect of wind by making the blue felt pen streaky across the background.
Tuesdays #bandofsketchers prompt was View. We have a Robin flitting round the garden. Rather than drawing a real landscape I tried to draw our bird table and vegetation. I sketched the Robin from a photo because it wouldn’t stay still long enough to photograph! Felt pen drawing.
Describe one positive change you have made in your life.
It was a drastic decision, but I don’t regret it. Each time I thought I knew my job inside out the management changed things. In that sort of situation you could be doing the right thing one day and the wrong the next. That’s the problem with hierarchy, the top decides and the bottom has to implement rules even if they don’t make sense. And each time the goalposts move it’s not likely to be in your favour.
So I found myself out of work, but not regretting it. I had enough money to live on for a while so I set myself up as an artist. Of course I had grand ideas of sales and building a clientele, but at that stage I really didn’t know that my health would not be good. With that and the pandemic (no I haven’t had covid as yet) I found I really didn’t have a business. But I don’t care, I’m away from the humdrum, I’m not being made miserable by rules I don’t like and don’t want to follow. I have had more freedom to be myself than I ever had during the rest of my life. I guess I’m what they call semi retired. A hobbyist? I’d rather paint than do anything else.
Would I reverse the change? Never. I’ve only been back and seen my colleagues a couple of times. The past is the past, let it be!
I’m imagining the back of a playing card with a pattern on it like this? Two profiles facing each other, one turned upside down. It’s based on the idea of the two heads on the King, Queen and Jack cards. Are they designed to read from both top and bottom to make it easier for all players to read them?
I am not a graphic designer so I am not sure what criteria I would need to actually make these, but I’m having fun as I experiment again.. Hope you enjoy my scribbles x
Sundays #bandofsketchers prompt was drink. I’m finally trying to catch up with the prompts. This is a digital finger painting of a drink can. I used the Artrage app to draw it. I’ve adjusted the colours with Instagram because it looked quite dull.
I’m playing with oil colours in Artrage. I wanted to create a geological, rocky sort of image, like a slab of slate. Then I decided to split it into a collage, like five pieces of cake. It was interesting to create an abstract pattern, and I love the blues and reds as they smudged together. If I had oil paints I would try and recreate this as a real painting. I don’t know how I would do it though.
A dragon drawing, I found a spiky line on the sketching app that really made this look interesting. I did my final major project at college on Dragons last year. So when I find a new way to represent them I like to experiment.
This is done in two apps, the initial line work was done on Sketcher app and then I exported it and opened it up in Artrage because the tools there are more flexible for colouring in and it also has metallic and Glitter options. I like it.
I just tried to delete some of my images because the memory on my WordPress media is on 99.8%!
For some reason all the photos went blank and the system would not let me delete any of the images, very worrying. What to do? All I could think was switch the phone off and switch it back on again… I held my breath. Yes! It’s working properly again.
I don’t know why it stopped, I had tried to use the free media section and it would not upload an image from there, so perhaps that created a glitch? All I can say is when I tried to look up the artist John Constable on it I got lots of images that were very generic, and non showed a Constable painting! Oh well….
“it’s gone black over Bills mums” they say round here when it goes dark and cloudy. When the clouds pile up and you sometimes get snowy white tops to them when there is some blue sky too. The wind suddenly whips up. I was out in something like this today. One minute rivulets of rain were running of my brolly (umbrella) and the next it whipped inside out! The gust almost took it out of my hands.
I turned into the wind, getting soaked, and used the gust to bend the umbrella vaguely back into shape. Then I closed it to make sure all the little struts were shutting properly. One thread had wrapped itself round a strut, so I had to release it before I could concertina it down into shape. But all was well.
On the way home the sun shone in front of me and I looked behind at the dark clouds in the hope of seeing a rainbow, but sadly there was none.
Sleep, memory, chases my mind.
I remember we were twins
When you were still here
Now your shape is gone
A space left in my landscape
So before I weep again
Bring me more dreams of you
Here beside me
Her next to me
Sister, twin.
Mallaband-Brown