Behind the Scenes

I don't just make art, although one would think this having read my blog in recent times.  Today is Wednesday and in my world that means it's 'Knit and natter' morning with my Mum and my sister.  We tend to crochet and natter but this year I am determined to branch out and improve my very rudimentary knitting skills.  My motivation is a book on Estonian lace (knitted) that has sat on my shelf waiting for me to miraculously become a marvelous knitter.  So, in 2013 I will make a start. 

Behind the scenes of painting and drawing life, I have made (or mostly completed) these.....

 

Two scarves in Queen Anne's lace pattern and made with Jo Sharp Cotton.  These are the two outermost scarves in blue and the right is a deep aubergine. Two plain but deliciously soft and warm straight scarves both in wool.  I simply need to tie in the ends for them to be finished.

 Two wild and wonderful corkscrew scarves.

 

 A snowflake garland with bright button centres.  Once again poor light = poor photos.  Sigh.

 A riot of colourful bunting, crochet flowers, stars and wreaths ready to be adorned with bits and bobs.  Just some assembling and finishing off and all will be done here.

 

A bit of colourful frivolity that I had to do as soon as I saw it on Lucy's blog Attic 24 .  I still need to sew this together, add beads and other finery before this beauty shall be hung on my wall.  I'm thinking perhaps in the studio.

A meadow in the studio

Nothing but flowers will do for me this week.  They are preoccupying far too much thinking space and are greedily claiming my attention.  Overtaken by this current obsession I ventured out into the garden, my two sweet girls at my heels sniffling and snuffling as they read the messages left in the world that only dogs can read.  Now I have an extensive, very full, somewhat wild garden which covers most of our 1.3 acres.  It is a very green garden however full of trees and shrubs and many things wild and green, so I wasn't hopeful of finding many blooms to appease my need for flowers.  Well, what a surprise I had.  A snip here, a snip there, up high, down low and suddenly I had so many blooms and interesting things I needed to run and gather a wee basket.  I continued to snip and when the basket was full I returned inside with a happy, smiley heart to lay out my bounty ready to photograph and sketch.

There are blooms from tibouchina, candlestick plant, jasmine, crucifix orchid, dahlia, geranium/pelargonium, geisha, dandelion, pentas, ixora, hydrangea, the dried seedpods of a native iris and the flower from a croton. So much colour and yet because it is so spread out amongst the riot of green that I don't notice them so much.  Shame, shame, shame. 

I'm off to bed so I will share some of the sketches next time.  Goodnight and sleep sweet wherever you are.

Busily preparing for something that isn't

Yes, you read that correctly.  I have been busily preparing for a joint exhibition over the Easter weekend. However, we found out last night that due to insurance issues we are no longer able to go ahead with the exhibition.  This is a shame but I am also relieved.  I felt quite rushed with only four weeks preparation and a very small body of work.  This will give me time to add to my body of work, improve my art and grow in confidence.  Another positive that has come out of this is that I've been in the studio more and have been able to make a plan and work to it to produce work in a deadline driven situation.  I've developed a better idea of how much time I can spend doing art before my body starts to protest and collapse which is a huge help.  I've fallen into the habit of doing about a six hour day on a Monday and then two to four hours a day on following days.  I can't sustain larger consecutive days.

This is what I've been working on....

Finishing my latest hard edge piece. Will edit in a better photo when the rain stops and I can get one.  I love the colours in this, particularly the water and the vase.  Not the greatest composition however as the lighthouse and vase fight for attention.  Live and learn.

I have also been working on a charcoal image depicting a cropped view of Michelangelo's Pieta.

Have I shown you the process I go through to do a charcoal portrait?  I will talk you through my next one.  Above you will see that I've done a line drawing and then start to fill it in with shading etc. I just work at it until I end up with the finished product.

I'm really quite happy with her.  It's not hard to come up with something good when you are copying a genius.....

Progress

Couldn't find a camera so had to use my phone to take this photo so not a great image.  I'm really pleased with the pot of flowers.  Just looking at them makes me heart skippy happy.  I still need to adjust the colours of the green hills as the present colour has them sitting too far forward in the image. Still need to finish the rocks, put a latch on the window, add curtains, paint the rocks near the lighthouse, possibly change to size of the little sail boat, add sheep to the hills....  The sand is not that yellow in real life either.  The camera's have been found so will take better photos later.  I have also started a close up 'portrait' of a tulip on a 30x30cm canvas.  Will share that with you soon. 

Happy St Patrick's Day!!

Finishing and starting

Today I think I have finally, finally finished the rose painting.  I have signed it however this often sends me into a frenzy of fine tuning on the canvas instead of walking away.....  I'm not particularly happy with how my colour experiment in this piece turned out but as with most paintings I have learned along the way.  For some reason I had dreaded doing the heart of the rose and in the end it turned out to be far less daunting than my imagination and knotty stomach told me. Not really sure why I baulked at it.

Hmm, a rather glamorous shot of the down pipe there.....oh well, this is turning into a 'warts and all' art blog!

Edited to add cropped picture of rose..... :)

My next window-scape in the hard edge style is starting to take shape after putting some time into it yesterday.

My initial inspiration came from a small sketch done about 3 years ago.  It had shells on the window sill and I changed them to these rocks that I've seen at the beach in England (my head is so in England and Scotland at present - been going over old photos).  I have recently found artwork with these rocks in them in a similar hard edge style so am worried they might be too similar.  May change them for the final piece.  I am enjoying doing this hard edge style this time though.  Completely opposite my experience when doing my last hard edge piece for my course.  The above photo shows a larger sketch and two iPad images where I draw on the iPad and play with colours before printing it out.  I think I've decided to put a sail boat in instead of a little tug or fishing boat.

I then drew this up onto a small canvas as I showed you in my last post.  I'm using small canvases at the moment in the hopes of getting more art done in time for the exhibition over Easter.

The first layer of paint is down in large blocks of solid colour.  This gives me an idea of what changes I need to make to colours.  I think I'll mix a new sand colour using the cadmium yellow mid and titanium white. I used Naples Yellow here and it's not quite right.  I also need to fiddle with the greens, I mixed them rather haphazardly just to get some paint down and will think more closely this time. I will draw in the next layer of details with a pastel pencil and layer them on too. Once that is completed and I'm happy with all the colours I'll just continue painting layers until I have good coverage of the canvas.  In this style I do between two and four layers.

Here's a little peak at my painting set up when I do this hard edge style.  I paint sitting down (I usually paint standing at the easel), just find it easier to sit to do this style.  I mix my paints in an ice-cube tray from a limited range of colours.  I then store this in a plastic container that can be sealed with a lid. A pastry storer in this case.  Throw a wet kitchen sponge in with it and the paints (Atelier Interactive) will stay mobile, moist and able to be used for months.  I find this great for when I'm tired as it minimizes clean up and preparation on a daily basis, I just pop the lid on, clean my brushes and walk away.

I did six hours in the studio yesterday and although I felt ok last night I haven't been great today.  I still managed to put a couple of hours in but had the dropsies and found it quite hard to concentrate.  I'm still so thrilled to have found something to do that fits around my health and the needs of my body.  Grateful, so very grateful.....

Making Art

Over Easter I am participating in a local art exhibition to launch our local Arts Trail. In preparation, I spent the whole day in the studio working on ongoing pieces and planning new ones.  For quite awhile I've been working on a giant rose painting - about 1m x 85cm. I set myself a goal of using only three colours red, white and black to paint this rose and I'm not sure it will be an experiment that provides the best painting as an result.  I shall persevere though. Because I didn't use my artist diary to document how I mixed the colours I have run into difficulty at different stages throughout the process when needing to remix colours as I ran out.  NOTE. TO. SELF.  USE - ARTIST'S DIARY.

The Process.

After priming the canvas I painted a solid pink colour over the whole canvas and sketched on the rose using a white pastel pencil.  Hard to see but may show up better if you click on the image.

I then started to paint the outer petals and progressively moved in towards the centre.

This is where I stopped weeks and weeks ago.  I continued today but have used a different camera and for some reason it has altered the colour and has minimized the red.  The above photo is truer to the real life colours.

I still have to complete the very centre of the rose. It's an indiscriminate blob at present so needs to be refined.  You get a little peep at my studio (formerly known as the Granny Flat) in the background.

I also primed watercolour paper ready to collage and three canvases of different sizes ready to paint.....  I used gesso.

I worked on a thumbnail sketch for a new, small painting in the hard edge semi-abstract style that I used for this painting.  Even managed to transfer most of the image onto canvas ready to start painting.

I spent time gathering reference material and ideas for another few pieces into my artist's diary.  Lesson learned.

This is the table where I work on thumbnails, do charcoal and graphite drawings or gaze dreamily into my garden.

I hope to have the rose finished by my next post and some better photos for you.  Thinking of you all.

Laziest blog post ever

Well my visitors have gone and I've spent the past week mainly sleeping in order to get my body back up and running so I can participate in life again! :) I am now involved with a local art group and have spent a bit of time this week planning artworks for a local exhibition over Easter.  I'll include all the details in a later post. 

Other than resting and plotting artwork, this is the only thing I have done.  What a lazy old thing I am for piggy-backing a blog post.  Thank you to my sister Susan for writing this so I could just link to it. 

Will have a less lazy post up for you later this week.