New paintings and regular art updates.
Today’s #bandofsketchers prompt was slime. A drawing using a photo of my hubby, I’d already drawn over it. I tried to add a layer of slimey gloop as if it was a sculpted bust covered in ectoplasm from a ghost in Ghost busters. You hopefully get the idea?!
I put a sunset photo through the photodirector app (styles) and liked this result. The effect seems to be like oil on water, fluid but blocky. The colours are subtly concentrated in patches and the line edges are more curved.
There are about seven options for textures so I went through them all to choose the one I liked best. Some of them are more smudged than others.
Oh it’s just a doodle of blue birds on a green background. My ears are doing strange things, I just heard a song from the TV suddenly very loud in my left ear. Then I loud whistling. I got distracted so I posted this instead of something more interesting. Anyway you can see my process of drawing in one app then manipulating it in another. Off to stick my head under the shower to try and stop the whistling…
I’m having fun digitally altering that old painting. It’s given me an idea of what I might do to it. One thing about digital manipulation is that you get a regular pattern across the whole piece. It looks much more modern. I may do thus in reality.
Life isn’t all perfect paintings. Sometimes if you can’t work out what to change you could take a photo and then use some digital filters to alter the image. It may not be perfect but it can be more interesting…
I used photodirector tools to make this look more like a print. It could also be painted on wood. The point is playing can help creativity. I like being a mad professor of experimental art. X
Here’s a little green abstract to wish you a happy St Patrick’s day.
I once found a four leaf 🍀clover, so it feels like a lucky day. St Patrick was supposed to have cast all the snakes out of Ireland 🇮🇪 and to this day there are non there. I guess it could be that Ireland is an Island?
St Patrick’s day is celebrated in Ireland and in the USA where they have been known to colour rivers green. Its not unusual to have parades of marching bands and floats. The predominant colour is green, even green coloured drinks! The symbol is an Irish man with red hair and a beard wearing green clothes and sporting a shamrock ☘ (which I think is similar to clover, but a perennial plant). Much fun and hilarity is enjoyed by the population on St Patrick’s day.
We don’t celebrate St Patrick’s day as much in most of the UK, I think because Ireland is a mainly Catholic country and mark saints days more than we do.
The green abstract was drawn with felt pens then filtered through photodirector to add texture, and an app called layout to add symmetry.
When we had our bookshelves put in I could reach most of the books, now, twenty years later its much more complicated to reach the higher shelves. I can’t stand on the footstool because in not very balanced anymore. There are folding stepladders, but I need to turn them sideways and balance issues and holding on to them is the problem. My left arm shakes which makes it hard to hold on. Hubby makes it worse by not putting them back! Sometimes I can squeeze books on the lower shelves, but often they end up stacked on the floor and are then a trip hazard. There is also stuff in front of the bookcases because I can’t move it upstairs or to my studio. Life can be difficult. But I’m too attached to them to get rid of them!
When you sit all day feeling ill with a sore throat and a cough what do you do? I draw wobbly sketches! Play with filters, add colours, use metallic pens. Play with words. I think since I’ve been doing Esther Chilton’s blog challenges (limericks and five word challenges) it’s made me think more about words and how they work. It’s also taking part in #bandofsketchers prompts which gives me the chance to illustrate different ideas. Yes it is just a minor, wobbly, not very clear sketch, and I have put it through digital filters. But it keeps my mind busy and takes it off other thoughts, like feeling too sorry for myself. I think I experience flow, that feeling of time passing without you noticing, and being in the ‘now’? X
#bandofsketchers prompt on Thursday was mountain, instead of my usual felt pen drawing I created layers of sketching over an initial photo that I had put through some filters on my phone.
Trees and roots and cars reflected in a photo, then filtered digitally in various ways. I have buzzing ears today so I don’t want to spend a long time describing what I’ve done to the photo. I could say my whistling ears have been partly responsible for this, undulating noise, like a tide whispering in and out, and the picture seems to be covered in dirty ice that lumps up over the surface? Anyway, it’s just an experiment for today. A bit of synesthesia perhaps?
Mallaband-Brown