An artist!

When you were five, what did you want to be when you grew up?

Not when I was five!

Give me crayons, give me colouring books. Books with paper covered in dots that you wet with a paintbrush and colours emerge.. Dot to dot books, pages with squares on that I could turn into patterns. I might have been a bit older than five for some of these, but I always wanted art things for my birthday or Christmas. I must have heard of artists because I always wanted to be one. I got an etch-a-sketch machine to draw with, I loved that.

My sister wanted to be a musician, she eventually borrowed a violin from school. I got jealous because my parents said I was doing art and they couldn’t let me have a musical instrument, so I overtightened the strings on the violin and they snapped ( bad/very guilty memory!)…

Now? I’ve been an artist all my life. I started drawing when I was a child such as historical people in tudor dress, Asterix the Gaul, horses, clouds, all sorts of things. I still do that, anything is interesting to me.

Renoir collaboration

The second, and most difficult, painting collaboration by Orme Art Group from this summers challenge.

It’s, amazing to have so many techniques and styles pulled together in this final image. Some parts line up better than others but it really shows the tenacity of the group with all the complicated figures and colourful background we tried to copy. I hope Renoir would not have been too disappointed!

Have you noticed?

Big feet?

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?

Quick figures

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Quick sketches of figures while I sat on a roundabout in the park yesterday. I added a little dog, sitting next to one of them. And an older female figure stooped over. Our project this week at college was to do various things, including drawing a person walking. I must do a better job, but these were a couple of minutes each, max.

They could be neat and tidy, but you can’t nail people down to make them still when you try and draw them.

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Ghostly

 

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Have you ever used a pin hole camera? This was me and a friend at our neighbours house. The pinhole camera was a biscuit tin, sealed with sellotape and with a sheet of black and white photographic paper in the base. The lid had a tiny hole created by hammering a small nail through it. I used a piece of card, I think, to cover the hole. In this case I stayed still for about a minute, but my friend moved after about thirty seconds if I remember correctly. The image was created by lifting the flap over the hole, then covering the hole up again after the exposure.

I don’t remember developing it. I’m sure I did, it was part of the coursework at college to do some photography. I did a few more. One of an old man, standing in front of this window, and one of me sitting on a setee inside the house by this window. In it I had turned my head right for thirty seconds and then left. The result was my body was visible, but my head was missing, just a stump where it should be.

That was forty years ago, a long time ago. The dim and distant past.