New paintings and regular art updates.
1.23am on Wednesday morning. I’m messing about with filters to create a scaly pattern. The inks were metallic and I tried to enhance the shinyness of it. I mirrored the image four times. Yet another pattern for my current college project. One problem I face was that all the colours are quite similar and of a medium tone, it was difficult to distinguish between dark and light areas.
Post it notes and plastic metallic colour discs. Thought about a pattern that I could make, using arrow shaped post it notes I decided to place the pointed bits over the discs. Have a glue stick, water soluble, so I glued each individual piece of paper and plastic… It took two hours! By the time I’d done it (after accidentally dropping the discs and the glue stick on the floor) my fingers were covered in a sticky gluey mess. Thank goodness it’s soluble!
This is a collage. I drew a black outline of discs in a fish scale pattern. Then I added one line of round plastic discs (I’d got from inside a balloon), then left a gap for the drawn line of circles, another line of discs and then the drawn ones, over and over till the page was full. Once I’d glued the discs in place I thought about how to fill the gaps. I decided to spray green ink over the page, which I dabbed off the plastic metallic coloured discs to leave clean and dry. I added black around the discs for shading, but it was a bit wishy washy. What next? I used silver felt pen on the green areas but it was boring so I got out all my old nail varnishes and dabbed them on the paper areas too. I used sparkly glitter nail varnish to finish it off. This is one of several experiments. I’m quite pleased with it. It certainly shimmers.
Covered in armour
Impenetrable scales
Against all drama
Arrows and staves
Flying above
Crawling below
Graceful as a dove
With a loud bellow!
Only a myth
An imaginary creature
Family kin and kith
In which lizards feature
Wings full of woe
Mouth full of fire
Where he does go
Things will be dire!
What is this thing
We wish will be gone?
Of it we will sing!
The inimitable Dragon!
I found a little skull on a walk a few years ago. Maybe a rabbit skull? Something with a printed snout. No teeth and no bottom jaw. I kept it as something to practice drawing on. Trying to get accurate details and shading. It struck me that I could use it as an idea for a dragon. I had an idea where the jaw would articulate, it would be a carnivore so teeth would be all along the jaw, (herbivores only have incisors and big molar teeth at the back). Now I have to think where the skin would sit and the size of its eyes….
One of the problems with taking photos in artificial light with a smart phone is that you cannot always get a good exposure. My solution after trying to alter the contrast and exposures of these two photos was to use a black and white filter. Once I posted them on my Instagram account I used the filter on there which bought out more details in the photos.
Maybe I should have used a fill flash or changed the setting to manual but I don’t know if that would have helped.
I went to an Art lunch today with fellow artists. We had a spicy pumpkin soup and different varieties of cake plus extra treats that pebought along.
The lunch was held at the warehouse building at Etruria Industrial museum, Etruria, Stoke on Trent.
We were asked to carve pumpkins for an event this weekend at the museum where they will be steaming the Etruria Flint Mill beam engine between 11am and 4pm on Saturday and Sunday this coming weekend.
The photos shown are my four carvings. A cat, a dragon, an abstract pattern and a sunflower shape. It was the most fun I’ve had for several weeks!
Scales again, I was playing with combinations of colour and black and white. I’m building a large collection of them. Maybe this is enough? Next step is to hang them on my character. Discussing the idea with others I might do a dragon that changes throughout the book. Not because I can’t draw it from different angles, but because it might need to change depending on its circumstances….. Hmmm, I keep seeing new directions!
Try and draw a pattern that fits together, so regular shapes interlock. It’s easy with squares or diamonds, triangles or even hexagons, but when you get onto irregular shapes it’s more difficult. Interlocking shapes made up of the same shape over and over are called tessellations I think. Although I’m not sure because tessera are the little squares or oblongs they use in mosaics I think? I really need to look these things up before I write them down!
Anyway I’m working towards drawing dragons, and they are usually covered in scales, like snakes. That led me to realise that ideally I would like an interlocking pattern. I could look at a snake, or a fish, or a lizard, but I just made my own up. I added some crosshatching for shade and patterns for interest. I hope people aren’t getting bored with my experiments!
I found this in my previous images on WordPress. It’s a tiny picture of a dragons eye that I painted a couple of years ago. Since I’m researching dragons for college and it seems to be something I’ve looked at over several years. This was a miniature piece about 1 1/2 by 2 inches. I was going to do some more but got sidetracked into doing other paintings. Like many of my mythological paintings it’s entirely imagined.
Mallaband-Brown