New paintings and regular art updates.
Today’s #bandofsketchers prompt was magic. Since I have been working on a project for college based on dragons I decided to draw possibly my last one for a while. I think they are full of magic! Felt pen and black ink fine line pen.
This is the sheet of lino that I carved out a dragon from for part of my MA final major project. I inked it up and got a reasonable result. I would like to try again and see if I can increase the complexity of the work. Its always good to learn new skills (without causing injury to myself). I don’t know if you can tell but it’s a dragon in flight. There is a girl riding it, the story is she helps it find it’s way home.
Part of a coffee pot that just has foreign stamped on the base. It has raised decoration of a dragon on it. I am not sure how old it is and whether it is Chinese or Japanese. Its a delicate design and it arrived wrapped in bubble wrap and it has gone back to its home the same way. I guess some of the design is airbrushed on, but that might mean it is more modern than I think it is. It would be interestingvto find out.
A friend reading at Etruria Industrial Museum. The orange area is the ink from the previous page showing through. I did this with a brush pen so it works slightly differently to a fine liner pen. Dark areas fill in better than with a thin pen. I might add texture in Photodirector later. It’s great to try and switch things round and explore different ideas. Practice in anything improves what you do. I’m also trying to teach myself a bit of lino cutting. More of that soon.
Today I put childrens book together in a site called Blurb. I had saved all my files as .tif files and it needed them as .Jpegs so I spent HOURS swapping them. A lot of the jpeg files were not able to open. It meant that I had to change some of the pictures for different ones. I’ve ordered a one off copy for my course. The only problem is that it might arrive late so I’m going to have to take the photos to a printer and mock up the book as well.
Ignore the grey colour. I’m trying to increase my text size in my story for college. Each section is in a box, but as I enlarge them they overlap the drawings a bit more, so I’m increasing the text but reducing the size of the boxes slightly. Done twelve so far, six to go! Argh!
Doorway at the Thai temple. So beautifully decorated. Golds and greens, amazing patterns. The celebration was outside so we didn’t go in, but I would have liked to. The skill and artistry is outstanding. I imagine the sort of skills you would need to carve church screens, or old furniture. Those skills are being replaced by computers or 3d printing. But hand carving and painting adds something special. Not clean and accurate, but human and possibly slightly flawed. It is fine art. X
Another late night experiment. I added the pink and red this morning, when I could see their colours clearly. Drawing under electric light means colours are not as easily perceived. The yellow cast of the light made it hard to decide what colours were on the felt pens. Pinks and oranges looked very similar. Why hearts? Just because the shapes I had drawn suggested them and I wanted a soft contrast to the strong black and white shapes.
I decided to paint something a bit different. I was calling it Medusa but a friend suggested Ulysses. I know the Medusa story but I’m not familiar with Ulysses so I think I had better look it up. This is another acrylic on canvas that I started late last night. I wanted to get a feel of paint on plaster, like a mural.
Mallaband-Brown