New paintings and regular art updates.
Sundays #bandofsketchers prompt was butterfly, moth or insect. I decided to do a symmetrical drawing of a butterfly using the Sketchbook app on my phone. Basically I haven’t seen many of them so far this year. So I preferred doing my own design rather than using an Internet image to work from. It’s definitely sketchy!
What would you change about modern society?
So many schools seem to concentrate on “worthwhile” subjects, Sciences, Mathematics, English. The old fashioned three R’s reading, ‘righting and ‘rithmeric…
But we need creative thought as well as producing drones that do productive work.
If you learnt technical drawing you could design cars, create architecture, produce blue prints for engineering. Yes it’s all at the press of a button now, AI does so much, but artistic ability can help with innovation and ingenuity.
Art helped our understanding of medicine, Leonardo DaVinci undertook studies of anatomy that were well before other medicine caught up. Look at his drawings of dissections to understand his fantastic knowledge.
Art is in advertising, illustration, magazines, books, clothing, wallpaper design, surface pattern, product design, ceramics. That worthless degree that our government might close down could be the next big digital game, the shape of rotor blades that save energy for planes or wind turbines. Even a more readable font for someone who is dyslexic.
So art really should be a big part of modern society. Without it there would be no fashion, no special effects for TV and film, no beautiful make up for theatre or other creative productions.
Life is not just bean counting, it’s about passion and beauty. Otherwise we might as well all be clones, in grey jumpsuits, working 9 hours a day, sleeping when we are told and not attempting to be any different than anyone else.
Artrage drawing played with in Incollage and Instagram. You can do all sorts of things by playing with a digital image, you can make interesting patterns and skew and tilt images if you try. I have often done things like this quite frequently, but it’s a while since I’ve created something like this.
I have a small commission and I need to create something gentle based on the idea of rain. I’ve used the theme of raindrops and water running down glass as an idea. This was drawn in my Artrage app and it’s a digital finger painting. I will try and do the painting in metallic acrylic paint.
A simple digital drawing using flood fill to fill in a sketch, then a line drawn over it to delineate the face and duplicated and flipped to create a collaged image. I like the freedom of digital abstraction.
Love of pattern
Shape and colour
Make me happy
Gives me joy.
Intricate design
Swirls and grids
Makes me excited
Somehow lightened
And restored
A friend just sent me this photo. It’s one of my little paintings in someone’s kitchen. Just a simple design. I was rather pleased to get this. Knowing my art is appreciated cheers me up!
I think this man sized puppet at Etruria canal festival a couple of weeks ago was meant to be a preying mantis. I didn’t get the details of the puppet theatre company but they are obviously very skilled makers! I think this is absolutely beautiful (sorry if you don’t like insects), the colours are amazing and the way it is painted with such great detail is a tour de force. If anyone knows the name of the puppiteers please let me know, put it in the comments. Then I will edit this post and include it here. X
I keep seeing cartoons of people with tiny heads, small bodies, long legs and big feet. Why? it’s fashionable I guess, artists and illustrators are as susceptible to that as anyone else. But is it lazy, or is it what clients are demanding? I can imagine a conversation, “we like your work but can you tweak it?”, “how would you like it?” can you exentuate the feet and make the face small? “,” OK “….
I can understand the concept, the viewpoint is low down, a bit like when a child looks up to a parent. It also makes the subject figure appear stronger because it towers over it’s surroundings, like a giant with seven league boots striding over a diminished landscape. But to me? It’s getting boring. There is no nuance, the parts of the figures are like cut out pieces of paper, no real shading.
There are various illustration programmes that allow you to stitch together a figure by dragging and dropping various elements to ‘build’ a figure and it’s environment. Like other AI and tech systems it’s taking over from real artists and real interesting designs. It’s basically safety as opposed to unique ideas. Dumbing down another profession. I appreciate it makes life for clients easier, but where is the innovation?
Great minds think alike?
I drew this this morning but hadn’t published it. I was just going through the reader section of WordPress and found someone else had done a very similar image. I did this digitally, playing with a drawing that I had been altering over the last couple of days. The other person’s art is four different female faces, using a totally different technique. It’s so interesting that artists come up with similar ideas from different beginnings. I like her style and work, good to see the creativity here!
Mallaband-Brown