New paintings and regular art updates.
They might not look like much yet, but I’ve just blocked in three small painting that I sketched out over the weekend. The middle one is of a cat curled up on an armchair. The chair will be covered in a holly pattern.the cat on the window ledge will have a blue and white vase next to it, and the pottery is an imagined view in the snow,
I’ve got a busy week so I might not be able to get online much. Also I’ve got toothache!
When you are learning to draw you can use a grid to help. If you are trying to copy an image you can draw a grid over the original, then draw the same sized squares on the paper you are drawing on. Finally copy the original onto the drawing by filling in each square. The grid helps you place lines more accurately. If you do the drawing in pen instead you can rub out the pencil lines. It’s really only a device to help learning to draw, or if you want to draw out the basis for a painting when you are using opaque paints like gouache, acrylics or oils. You can also use this for scaling up or down. If the squares are half size on the original the drawing will be twice the size (or vice versa), hope this makes sense.
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Sketching designs for winter paintings that can still be good to have on the walls all year round. I’ve seen a painting with a pottery in the snow, so I’m going to do something similar with Holly and Ivy. The second idea is a cat on a windowledge with a blue and white vase next to it.
Will try and get them painted this week.
I don’t remember it happening. It must have been long ago, before the sky fell, before the Mirohs arrived. When I was young?
The world had been burning, literally, fires everywhere. Ice melting. One day it was cold, the next boiling hot.
I don’t remember the day we reached 3..
Three degrees of global heating. They had said two was bad, but we got it even hotter. The seas won’t rise. My Mom told me that, it will never happen said Dad.
It’s all a blur. Running from the sea, trying to find homes in the hills. Millions crushed in the cities that were not on rivers…
They could have called it the great flood, but the papers said the sky was falling. What it meant was the rains and storms, so heavy they flattened towns in seconds, crops died. We started growing rice in paddy fields, it was the only way to get some sustenance in all the wet, dank weather.
Two years of hell passed. I was growing up and worked in the fields. All of the children worked. No schools, just back breaking work, bending and shoveling.
We hated it, but we were not polluting anymore. Life seemed to pause and take a breath…
Then the Mirohs came, an alien race. We saw their ship, huge, like a great storm cloud. They looked down at us. Like bugs we were to them. Then the killing started. The message, you didn’t care for your precious planet. So we will take it. Humanity is a pestilence. They put something in the water. Now no one can have children. In a hundred years or so…. We will be gone.
Will anyone remember us?
She was staring straight ahead.
Looking into the distance,
Into the past or the future?
No one knows.
Staring hard, vision blurred,
Tears forgotten.
Memory faded.
Staring at what?
Old hysteria?
New apathy?
Hidden thoughts,
Was it fate?
No one will ever know.
I did these sketches tonight because I’m part of urban sketchers. These were drawn at the Mystery play barn dance up at Penkhull village hall. The band laying were called the Shropshire Hero’s and the barn dance caller was Baz Parkes.
It was excellent fun although I was helping behind the bar for part of it. Just watching people dance was great. Some do well, others make mistakes. The worst thing that happened was someone accidentally stood on my foot. But that was because I was drawing, and I think I was a bit in the way, so I wasn’t looking and got stood on. I was more worried because the dancer almost fell over me!
The other problem with drawing dancers? You guessed it.. They don’t stand still!
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It’s Autumn and I’m already waiting for Spring! I need to work on the garden, cut shrubs back, plant tulip bulbs, plant snowdrops, then… Wait, wait, wait… Through the cold and rain, through the shirt dates and long nights.
I want to see the baby birds, the squirrel and its kits, the tadpoles in the pond (if we have frogs we must have tadpoles). I look forward to warmer, not too hot, days. Life returns.
In the winter here it usually does not get too cold. But it can be grey, wet and windy.
The clocks go back at the end of October, then the sun will go down an hour earlier, I hate sitting in the dark in the winter, trying to keep warm. Looking forward to the winter solstice when the sun starts coming back a little more every day.
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