New paintings and regular art updates.
Something to make me happy, aqualegia flowers. Today’s #bandofsketchers prompt was happy. They are also called Colombine or Grannies bonnets.
Ours come out in May. They hibridize and come in many forms and colours, with double or single flowers, pale yellow, pinks, reds, blues and purples. Some of them are single colours and others are bi colour. When the flowers fade and the seed pods ripen I collect the seed and scatter it all over the garden so they come up the following year.
A self portrait done when I would have been drawing portraits of other students, but the server was down. Its a mixture of collaged magazine paper, watercolour paint, black ink and ink spray and post-it notes. I think I wasn’t in a good mood when I drew it. I had been doing the drawing session once a week for about seven weeks and then something went wrong and I couldn’t join in. Anyone that follows my blog will know that creating art makes me very happy, it cheers me up, (although I don’t look it in the drawing!)
We went for a walk in the evening yesterday, and instead of just taking photos I took a small sketch pad with me. I couldn’t draw all the details I could see and because its black and white it’s hard to get shade and tone, but I did my best. The two blobs in the sky were hot air balloons. Too far away to see any detail and they were travelling sideways on to us very slowly (left to right). This took about 15 minutes, just trying to get an impression of the view over the valley. I wish I didn’t shake, my lines are very wobbly!
You can make a collage with almost anything. If it can be glued you can use it. You can also colour match things like felt pens with coloured paper to extend the image. I also add black pen to mimic the patches of black monoprint and shade the picture more. Experiment, learn, enjoy art.
I’m watching Spring Watch, a BBC nature programme that is on at this time every year in the UK. Its a pleasure to watch animals and see their lives, to see places in Britain that I may never visit. I can learn about the life cycle of beetles, explore pond life, watch deer that were imported by the Victorians. This time they have discussed ancient oak trees and what lives on them, the release of a seal in Ireland, buzzards and their young, swallow nesting and many other topics. So yes little owl, I’m watching you!
I did the drawing of a fingerprint for today’s #bandofsketchers prompt but there was some question of whether this was in line with the prompt. So I decided to do a fingerprint out of black monoprinting cut up in a collage. That didn’t really work because I couldn’t stick thin enough pieces of paper down. So it’s morphed into a rather cheeky couple of birds!
Today’s #bandofsketchers prompt was printed. I looked at print on newspapers, printed wallpaper, print on clothes, print on my computer screen. Fonts, colours, text sizes. But I decided to draw a fingerprint instead (not mine, imagined, based on a fingerprint but not something you could track down someone’s identity from). Apparently you can also identify people from their earprints!
When you are on zoom upstairs and your hubby is deaf so can’t hear you shouting. I find the best solution is to ring from my mobile to the land-line downstairs! Does anyone else do daft things like this? The result was a nice cup of tea while I didn’t miss any of the practice. And no I said thank you when he brought it up to me, not after he’d gone back downstairs.
In January I started a back to life sketchbook for my college course. This was day ones drawing, a falcon on my mouse at, pens and my computer mouse. I continued drawing every day from then on, I have done all sorts of drawings and I’m still doing them (today was some ice cubes). That effort has been interesting, sometimes confusing, difficult to maintain if I could not find something to observe and draw. But it has been rewarding. My imagination has been stretched and expanded. My ideas generation has improved. I would recommend drawing everyday to anyone who is interested in art.
sketching using ArtRage, an app I have on my phone. This was quite hard to do because I’m not quite used to the app yet for straight drawing. It’s getting the colours to blend without them being too pale. I want to use digital art like pencil and paint.
Mallaband-Brown