New paintings and regular art updates.
I carved this pumpkin cat last year for Halloween at Etruria Industrial Museum. It is meant to be a black cat if it was lit at night. I think they used battery tea lights for safety. I think I carved three or four with different designs. Memories of a more cheerful time. I should say be careful carving out pumpkins. I thing I cut a finger slightly while I was doing this x
The gallery I have my poppy paintings in has used my poppy meditation to create a jigsaw puzzle. I need to see it in reality to check the colours and clarity of it but was a lovely surprise. Lots of thoughts about other ideas too. Cushion covers, tee shirts? A whole new world of opportunity.
This morning it was dark at seven am. Tomorrow night our clocks go back an hour in the UK. On Sunday morning it will be getting light an hour earlier and we will get an extra hour in bed. Fine, but then we lose that hour in the evening, so it will be going dark at five pm.
I Hate that. I find my spark going out in the winter. I feel like a wraith wandering through the gloom. I don’t think I have SAD, but I am Sad. I wait till the sun starts to go down later every day, as the winter Solstice passes, and the returning Sun starts to cheer me up again.
A favourite painting done seven years ago. It was called Autumn Woman and was snapped up by an old friend. I like slightly surreal images, thinking about traditional art and giving it a slight twist. I may do a painting that includes leaves and fungi using this as an inspiration. I’m so happy with the colour combinations, I forgot that you can include blue as an autumnal colour.
I decided to do a bonus small painting to go with my bigger close up of a poppy. It’s called red poppy. It’s hard to come up with an original title. Lots of red used in these but I’ve tried to vary them and give that wrinkled feeling that poppies have.
I think this might be finished but I’m waiting for daylight to check the colours. I might tone down the white and I may add some blue tones to make it feel like the sky is being reflected in it. The poppy was real, but I took this from a painting I did of a photo so I might look at some images of poppies.
Work in progress. I want to try and get more realism into this. It’s based on a previous painting, but I decided to try and get in closer and give a finesse to the petals texture and the central structure of the poppy. I’ll post again when it’s finished.
Today’s #bandofsketchers prompt was Australia. I had this mad idea to draw a giant kangaroo balloon. It has to be tied down to stop it blowing away. Hence the speech bubble ‘I tied my kangaroo balloon down’ it’s a bit silly but it cheered me up!
I keep getting told I should try and get some of my designs printed on tee shirts. I love colour and patterns and I just keep creating them. Some of them are tweaked digitally, some are drawings in sketchbooks, others are digital patterns. I have thousands of drawings. My brain just keeps going on and on and on…..
Tuesdays #bandofsketchers prompt was door. So I drew a hobbit style door to cheer myself up. Felt pen and black ink fine line pen. The door would be solid oak and a neat flower bed would be planted on either side of it. I love the story the Lord of the Rings, I’m not sure about the films, but I have a set of cassette tapes that have the Lord of the Rings radio series that was broadcast by the BBC in about 2000?
Mallaband-Brown