New paintings and regular art updates.
Cats are hard to draw when they are washing, they move from one position to another and when you are trying to capture them on a drawing tablet its harder because of changing tools mid drawing. My hubby just chimed in that its harder to draw flying bats! True, I just haven’t seen any recently.
Anyway I will try and do something different next time. I’m just a bit stuck in a rut today, so please excuse my lack of posting today.
Back yard colours. The Usk Stoke-on-Trent challenge today was ‘hanging’ so I got my new permanent markers out. I tried not to do any black outlines to make the colours jump more!
The picture includes our hanging baskets and a dream catcher that hangs in our back living room window. There is a little glass angel hanging in the dream catcher. When I asked my hubby what he thought he said it was a bit amateurish!
The only problem with permanent markers is that they dry up quickly. You can be half way through shading something and they run out. More in a couple of days.
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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?
‘Neddy’ named by my hubby. Used the watercolour background I’d created and found an image of a horse or pony with a long mane.
I used fine black nib marker pens to draw him, then permanent markers to add some colour to him and to the tall grass around him (fading the colours as it went higher to give a feeling of depth). I then used a 6B graphite pencil to soften the strength of the marker pens. I drew this because I liked the overgrown mane. If the pony ran it would flow out backwards like a billowing curtain or long ribbons.
I did this today because I didn’t have a prompt from stoke urban sketchers so I thought I would still draw something to keep going.
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I painted this small painting a few weeks ago. I was seeing if I could even get close to the great artist Hokusai’s work. If I’d painted on to paper I might have added the fishing boats that are being dragged into the great wave while the fishermen in them try and row away from it. It was so hard to get the fingerlike protrusions that show the wave breaking. The colours are not too far off. I think the sky is greyer? When you try and analyse a picture its hard not to miss the the mistakes you have made. Being self critical is important because you try and improve each time.
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Out and about. A local street I have not walked down since March. Got to it by going up our very steep hill. It was only a couple of miles but I’m shattered. Black and white sketch taken from a photo. I wish I had drawn it in situ, but I didn’t have my sketchbook with me.
The plant really was growing out like a triffidcacross the pavement. I really liked it. Very interesting.
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Fireworks. That’s what this is called. This is my second variation using four initial A6 images on an A3 page. I played with the background I did yesterday, with more black ink, more shading, but I added iridescent white to brighten plus thin strips of paper to try and make little explosions to brighten it.
Next step may be to swap a couple of images. I might cut into one or two of them. We will see….
Nine if us from the Orme art group collaborated to do this copy of a Cezanne still life. Each had a chosen oblong to copy. Mine was the sixth. With part of a peach and a glass.
Interesting how it turned out. I used permanent markers and a bit of watercolour paint. My colour pallette was limited by the colours of the felt pens. The other tricky thing was pattern matching, getting the fruit to line up and the colours to match. I think we did a good job. Wouldn’t mind doing another one. X
I posted this and other photos to my Instagram page and a friend commented that they looked like views out of an airplane window of the sea with islands in it.
I had concentrated on trying to see animals in the image. I can see a snarling bears head at the top left of this one for instance. But it reminded me of a holiday in Dorset one year. Driving up over the hills of the county, just before we dropped down towards Weymouth on the coast, the sky looked like mountainous islands with sea, bays and inlets running through them. I wish I’d been able to take a photo…
The sky had been a pale wash of pastel colours, the sun was setting, but because we were heading due south its glare was catching the sides of the clouds, they were lit up with gold on one side and greys on the other. The ‘sea’ was all pale pinks and blues. If we had not spent all day driving I would have pulled over. The image faded as we headed towards the caravan site, but it was the precursor of a lovely week away. Maybe I can find some old snaps of the places we visited.
I often look at cloudscapes and see landscapes.
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Not my favourite challenge, but I looked out of the window and saw various triangles. I rearranged the clothes on the airer so they made definite triangles, and the coats on the cupboard were hanging down in a triangle. I left the standard lamp out because it didn’t help the composition. The acrylic paint I used is quite opaque and as the group I’m in is called Urban sketchers Stoke-on-Trent I felt the sketchy feel was OK. If I had been doing a ‘proper’ painting I would have done a more realistic, painterly I ture. But I was concentrating on the triangles….
