New paintings and regular art updates.
I decided to paint a rusty old car for my final tiny painting. It’s meant to be a morris minor. It’s small matchbox sized and I hope to add some nice details. But after a lot of messing about for other people today I’m a bit tired so I might have a snooze first. This will hopefully count as fine art but it is a sketch or acrylic drawing at present. X
I’m struggling with this imagined landscape. I want to get the reflections realistic and it’s just a bit too splodgy. The painting itself is about 5×4 inches approximately. I was trying to paint a vaguely historical scene, but that would need smoke belching out of the chimneys and a canal barge. Still I can do more work…
My friend sent me a photo of some alliums and it reminded me of a firework. The tiny flowers look like stars. This is a bigger painting (4x4inches) and it comes with a little wooden frame which I might paint.
It’s a work in progress. I need to improve the details. It’s getting dark in the house so I will have to turn on the lights to continue. I also want to paint some more unusual images…
Acrylic on canvas painting, work in progress. Of trees and rocks or stones. But I don’t remember what I was doing with it. I found it in the summerhouse while I was helping clear it up. I must have started it sometime last year. Perhaps in the winter. I’ll have to make a story up? Maybe it was too cold in there and the water froze, or the weather changed and continuous rain put me off. I’m going to get my brushes out and try and finish it off….
So much can change when you paint! The initial acrylic sketch, then as I painted I realised the eye on the right was too far over, the nose too long, the mouth too big. Having the paint out the eye and restart was hard. I then realised her pupils were not lined up. I’ve refined the nose and tried to improve the shading. I’ve got to sort out the body and arms (her knee was up and in the way), I want to paint nice neat draping cloth instead of jeans maybe add a floral pattern to her top. Her hair is a 70’s perm, but I will work on that. Need a rest now. Three hours work… Thankfully someone reset my phone so it stays on longer, the screen was fading every minute!
I went to the Orme Art Group charcoal workshop today. It was run by an artist called Jo Watson and she taught us various techniques. Here I used brushed on charcoal powder smudged with a rubber tipped tool. Then I used willow charcoal sticks which you put on in a random way, then smudge again to lighten the charcoal. Finally you add darker layers to add contrast but you can tone these back to the paper colour, either by using a putty rubber you can shape, to lift off a layer of charcoal, or you can use a mechanical eraser thar rubs off patches to make the drawing lighter.
Work in progress. Needs work on the beach which I think is a bit dark…. I was trying to get a feeling of sand. This is a small commission so I’m trying for a realistic look. It’s based on a drone photo I saw online but it’s not an exact copy, just using it to see how the wavelets ripple onto the shore.
Imm painting a victorian style oven as a bit of scenery for a Christmas Carol. I’ve just drawn something out but the cat appears to think it’s real! The cat sat on three mats…. Will post the result when I’ve painted it. X
I think this might be finished but I’m waiting for daylight to check the colours. I might tone down the white and I may add some blue tones to make it feel like the sky is being reflected in it. The poppy was real, but I took this from a painting I did of a photo so I might look at some images of poppies.
Work in progress. I want to try and get more realism into this. It’s based on a previous painting, but I decided to try and get in closer and give a finesse to the petals texture and the central structure of the poppy. I’ll post again when it’s finished.
Mallaband-Brown