New paintings and regular art updates.
My friend gave me this. A hand painted ceramic cat with fish on it. One fish seems to be biting the tail of the other one, both they and the cat seem to be happy and smiling. There seems to be a sea shell below the head of one of the fish. Perhaps this is a fishing cat? It’s a flat back ornament with no decoration on the back. I think it’s sweet, naive, simple, a bit rough round the edges. But fun.
Late last night I decided to colour in a drawing with nail varnish. I did a picture of ‘the cat sat on the mat’, then I coloured in the background with marker pens.
I had difficulty taking a photo I wanted to include the sheen of the varnish but could only get it with the page tipped up. When you look at it straight on the image is a lot flatter. It’s just a design based on the old cat sat on the mat idea. I can imagine it being used as a children’s book illustration.
I had a candy vacuum which lasted ages. When it broke we got a Dyson, but we had problems because it had a small capacity and too many filters. Then we got a Vax, again too many filters and my hubby lost a seal in the bin when he emptied it. I tried sellotaping it but that didn’t work. In the end we got a Henry, the one with a face on it. It’s got a large capacity bag and you don’t have to clear the filters in the wheels every five minutes!
My ‘music’ sketch. We have a stack of music playing equipment over in the corner, CD player, cassette player, speaker and loads of old videos etc. All a bit out of date now. Sadly we mainly listen to the radio so it’s all gathered dust recently.
For the #bandofsketchers series of sketches I’m doing to respond to prompts that are posted every other day. If you come to Facebook and look for band of sketchers you could join in.
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Just played with some photos of a single maple or sycamore leaf. I added some lines and patterns and ended up with three different green man ideas. Maybe one day I will turn these into cards? I enjoy tweaking things and making something different.
I went to a Batik workshop about three years ago when I first got my studio at Spode. I’d never done it before, but basically we used hot liquid wax as a resist to dyes. When you paint coloured dyes over the pattern you make, the colours are not absorbed into the cloth or canvas where the wax had been painted. Then you have to het a hot iron and paper and iron the wax out with the paper between the cloth and the iron so the wax gets absorbed into the paper. There is probably a clearer way of explaining, but as I say I only went to one workshop. My friend made this heavy frame for the yin yang cats. There is glass in it to protect the fabric. I was rather pleased with the result.
This is a thing now. I had a sketchy picture of my hubby done on black paper. I’d used pastels to do the drawing back in September, but after playing with nail varnish to draw a landscape view, I decided to use them on the drawing. It certainly had an interesting effect. It’s shiny and the colours change depending on where the light bounces off. I finished it off with adding a few lines with a silver marker pen. It reminds me of oil on water.
Sprig moulded jug? Longport
Hmm, still thinking about painting this. I like the colours and the ellipses. It looks good against the dark green background. The pattern on the plate has colours matching in with the jug and the wall. If I paint it I think I will enlarge the jug slightly, it’s a little small for the composition.
I ddo like creating patterns, so I used the drawing I did earlier to create something different. Bits of it remind me of Tiffany glass or stained glass pieces. If you rotate and twist the images you get something new each time… I will be using up the rest of my nail varnishes to create new images.
The BCB, British Ceramic Biannual, was on in the Spode China Halls last year. Fine China and art pottery cheek by jowl. I do hope it happens again next year. Bringing art into Stoke-upon-Trent and the rest of the city of Stoke-on-Trent and spreading creativity that sadly seems to have been forgotten by government during this pandemic.
Art has just as much a right as any other industry to continue in this world. Creativity and the power of the mind are linked. Science can go hand in hand with art. What we need to do is try and support everyone, not be selective towards the richest and devil take the hind most.
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