New paintings and regular art updates.
An acrylic on canvas painting I did in 2013. It popped up on my Facebook memories today. I can remember enjoying getting the texture of the building right. It looked like a great place to visit. This portrait was a Christmas commission. The person I did it for was very pleased.
Cat sat….
On the mat,
In the tree,
On the ground,
By a bush,
Under a leaf,
By a chair,
On the table,
In the washing machine??
On my lap, purr….
On my laptop!
On a silk blouse,
In the car?!
In a box,
In the shed,
Cat sits wherever it wants!
My friend is offering a beautiful print for sale and as a limited edition (not the image here, it has similar colours). I would love it, and it’s at a fair price for an artist to charge. But all I could think was, car tax and other bills are due in January. I have to realise I cannot afford it. Now I feel guilty for just enquiring.
I realise I don’t charge enough for my art. I have this strange idea that I want my art to go to a good home, so I undersell, swap art, or offer ways people can pay in installments. But I’m also doing other artists a disservice. If I charge less, how can they charge more? I think it might be my upbringing. Having a belief in myself? I guess it’s just how I am.
This was the neighbours leylandii trees a couple of years ago. I think I wrote a post about the shock of seeing them being chopped down. They were very big, taller than the neighbours house and right next to it, but I don’t think trees should go.
But then, my media files were over 98% full tonight. The tree photo and several more have had to go. And yet I’m preserving this here… But just to make the point. The blog post is still there. Its too much of a challenge to remove them.
So if you see posts without photos (almost all of them do have my own artwork), I apologise but I want to keep this going…
When you don’t sleep well it’s easy to be drawn into watching TV. The last few nights have been horrendous. I’ve not got to sleep until 5 or 6am. Then sometimes there is a programme I really want to watch. Tonight there are four hour long episodes of Monarch of the Glen. It was a series I watched twenty years ago and I haven’t seen repeats of it. The pleasure of watching it outweighs the sleep I am missing. But maybe one day I will get back to sleeping well.
Today’s #bandofsketchers prompt is watching. I’ve been watching my hubby watching TV. The last few days have seen a lot of watched TV, we could have done some walking but we’ve mainly kept ourselves to ourselves, just a bit of contact with the outside world….. Black ink fine line pen and green metallic pen.
It was just me and my hubby together for Christmas, but that means no pressure to get all the trimmings done! I haven’t made a trifle yet, I will probably do so for New year’s day. We had a £3.80 chicken for our Christmas Dinner (a medium turkey crown in sainsburys was £27.90!) We had a few beers and I made pigs in blankets to go with the chicken. I also roasted all the veg including the sprouts. There are plenty of left overs for sandwiches today and I don’t have to think about turning a turkey into a stew and a curry later in the week. The one thing I miss though was having a party with my sister, but I’d rather make sure we are all safe.
A sprout tree, that’s what my hubby bought for Christmas Dinner. I wasn’t sure how to cut the sprouts off this knobbly stick. I don’t have sharp knives so they are hard to cut off. When I tried the springiness in the branch they were on I suddenly had a sprout popping up the air! It flew up and landed on the floor, rolled sideways, and ended up under the fridge freezer. Cue some scrabbling with a spoon to get it back out! It happened again with the next one so I realised I needed to hold the sprout with one hand and cut it off with the other. I didn’t want to use the whole sprout tree today, ten ot twelve sprouts are enough, but the branch was too long. I could not cut it in half so hubby snapped it across his knee after I’d tried to cut through it.
I part cooked them in the microwave and now I’m toasting them with out Christmas chicken (the turkeys for sale were four times more expensive).
I was keeping my hand in drawing even though it was Christmas day. Funny what you find to draw. I was doing the cooking so I could have drawn the food, but I was not doing the main meal till later on Christmas day night (If that makes sense).
It meant I could either draw or watch TV. But you can only watch so much TV. If it wasn’t so cold and wet and windy I might have been going out for a walk. But there’s always tomorrow. My hands are always restless and ready to draw, sometimes are better than others but you can’t beat drawing and sketching.
So what to draw? I was given this owl keyring as an extra Christmas present, I might just use it as a decoration though, its got coloured stones glued to a gold coloured body and I think they would soon detach if I carried it around. I have a mobile hanging in a window and I might try and attach it onto that? Next question is should I colour it in? I quite like the simplicity of black and white, so for now thats how its staying. I might work on it in photoshop. Not decided yet. anyway I’m posting this at 5.30am after yet another sleepless night. Aches and pains and whirling thoughts. I know I should not be looking at screens, but its either this or watching TV news…
He’s a lone Teddy bear looking for a home. Green jumper with shamrocks on it, sitting forlornly on the chair. What’s he doing here? Don’t worry about him, he’s actually a present to me! I think he will be happy here. He has Ireland on his jumper so he’s come across the sea. He came in a box, shut in a small place, but now he’s released, free to roam about the house. I think he will sit with my other two bears, upstairs in our bedroom. I don’t know if he will have adventures but he can gossip with his fellow bears up there!
Mallaband-Brown