New paintings and regular art updates.
Good, I seem to be back to the old fashioned WordPress. I just tried posting on my tablet and everything looked completely different! I think I was in ‘blocks’! Now I have a post you can only see half of, basically this little drawing of a little goose isn’t even showing up unless you press a button to show more. Why? Grrr! I’ve been using WordPress for a couple of years now and I thought I’d got it sussed.
Ah well, sorry to moan.
The photo is an illustration and it doesn’t actually show parallax.
Do you know what parallax is?
Hold out your thumb in front of you and close one eye. Place it so that it covers something, perhaps a flower outside, or something in front of you. Maybe the moon.
Now without moving your hand open your eye and close the other one.
What do you see? The moon or the object appears to have moved! That is because your eyes are seperate. They are the base of a very long thin triangle and believe it or not you can measure distance that way.
Now stick a piece of wood in the soil on the equator, and a similar one a few miles north or south of it. At midday on the equator the sun will be directly overhead and there will be no, or hardly any shadow. But the one miles away will cast a shadow. The further away from the equator the longer the shadow. If you know the distance between the sticks, and the angle the shadow casts by the other stick. (measure the angle from the top of the stick and the end of the shadow) you can actually work out the distance to the Sun (which is casting the shadow). In this way the ancient Greeks did this and also worked out the size of the Earth approximately. You can use this idea if you look at a star at one end of the Earth’s orbit and six months later the other side of the orbit. That’s how they work out distances to stars. Amazing what you can work out by using your eyes, a couple of sticks and your thumb!
Take a pencil a pen or a paintbrush
Make a mark
See what happens
Feel joy and wonder
Learn your skills
Slowly, patiently,
Or fast
Reach for your imagination.
Be creative.
Create!
I ordered three books through a well known delivery system and they have all arrived safely. Now I have to read them. They are about designers, creatives and illustrators. There is a look into unpublished sketchbooks, an introduction to semiotics and another one about illustration. (OK so I forgot what the third one I ordered was and the text is to small to read off this photo). I shall be reading them tomorrow.
I’m trying to create a portfolio of all my images I’ve made so far on my illustration course. I have managed to add them to a Word document, but I need to know what the file size is and as I’m not up to speed with Word 10 I’m not sure where to look. If the file size is too big I will struggle to upload it to the college. Any ideas? I know I’ve got to convert it to a PDF but I wanted to find out how big it was before I did that… Duh!
How to depict art cuts?
Hear no, see no, speak no art?
Art is the senses.
Art is creativity.
Art is music, words, poetry.
Art IS life.
Take it away
Stultifying, crippling.
Education should educate
Should help create.
Where will our designers be?
Our musicians,
Architects?
Hairdressers?
Anything that adds something.
To bland and boring
Hard working
Reality.
I’ve been working on my portfolio for college today. I’ve got to upload it soon to show what I’ve been doing. I was halfway through when I found out I should be uploading images at 72dots per inch (dpi?) and I’ve set it at 300. I think I will have to delete all the images and save them all to the lower size limit…. So annoying because it was looking good. But at least I’ve found out in time. I need to go back and read the course instructions.
I think I’ve taken on too much sometimes. Not because I can’t do it but because I’ve got so many other things going on. I like writing here because it acts like a diary and also let’s me get ideas down that aren’t part of the course. Plus with limited contact with people it’s giving me some freedom.
Oil on canvas
Forty years ago I was at college learning how to paint. I had lots of fun and did some painting too! I used to paint in oils until I discovered how fast and clean acrylics were a decade or so later. I’m a fast painter but acrylics go off very fast so my style changed somewhat. Instead of mixing colours wet in wet on the canvas I ended up trying to get my colours right on the palette. I think I probably ended up with a more splodgy style until I learnt to blend layers on the canvas.
I thought I would try and share my idea about possible cuts in art education. It’s along the lines of the hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil images. In this case the image is of a school child. Maybe with one eye peeping out. Covering his head are the hands of other children, stopping him seeing art equipment, or hearing music or poetry. Stopping him speaking things like lines from plays or novels.
Art and creativity are so important to the world. Maybe you can push a button and get a car design? Maybe not. At the moment it still takes the efforts of designers, artists, illustrators, musicians, and much more to bring out the creativity of the world.
What are we doing if we consider removing Art from the curriculum? If we make it just the perogative of the rich? What happens if normal, ordinary people aren’t taught to have a critical eye, to have the ability to see beauty. I see a world which is almost turning into a 1984 situation. Dumbed down and quiescent?
I have a wide paintbrush you can use to spread watercolour across a page. On the right hand side is part of the original picture and the left hand side has had the hue digitally changed. The grass style marks were created by scratchingvthruogh the wet paint with the edge of a bit of plastic. I might try and use the original background in my sketchbook for a new drawing, and I might upload this image to draw something else. I like the feel of this. I might add a lone pine tree or something like that. X
Mallaband-Brown