Happy Christmas from Daniel's Centrepiece

My nephew made this fab table centrepiece a couple of weeks ago in school. He's really, really proud of it, so I wanted to paint it for posterity.

Dan - you did a fabulous job making this! Well done, from Auntie Tina xxx

Bumpy Knit

Since the weather has turned 'nitheringly' cold, all I seem to want to do is knit warm things! Hardly surprising really... This picture is of my current work in progress, a bumpyknit piece that looks a little like a scarf with self-coloured acne. Very odd, but quite quirky and cute :)

My thumb

I couldn't decide what to draw and was totally lacking inspiration, and there it was - right under my nose and positioned actually on the sketch pad. Damn useful!

It was fascinating to draw because like everyone, I rarely look in great detail at my hands. My entire thumb is made of tiny wrinkles that criss-cross over each other, which I wasn't expecting. If I'd attempted to draw this from memory, I would have assumed straight lines vertically down the length of the thumb - of which there are none!

Study of a bemusing Hairgrip

This hairgrip bemuses me. For a start, it's really quite large - about three times the length of an ordinary brown kirbigrip - and it's so incredibly detailed. It's more reminiscent of a Victorian antique than its actual origins - the local chemist shop. And - it refuses to be lost! I've had it for years and despite losing many, many other hairgrips, this one just refuses to go to wherever lost things live. It's like it has some kind of homing signal.

I'll admit that I did this a few weeks ago. I just haven't been in the 'zone' for drawing in the last few days! It was drawn with pencil, then inked and I used some watercolours.

Frosty Morning

Stunning, stunning sunrise this morning. Freezing cold and the grass crunched beneath my feet as I wandered into the garden to take this picture [whilst still in PJs]. This is the Yorkshire Plain at its' best!

The downside is that at 4pm yesterday afternoon, when I decided to do a quick 'chocolate run', it took me a good ten minutes to scrape the half inch thick ice off my car. Even worse, I managed to convince myself that if I was going to go to all the bother of scraping the car, then I'd better get a LOT of chocolate to make it all worthwhile.

The Christmas lard-fest starts here!

Frozen flowers in Oklahoma City - from the BBC Website

This has amazed me. In Oklahoma City ice has encased everything, making blades of grass look literally like blades, and turning tree branches into deadly weapons as the weight of the ice brings them crashing down on power lines, cars and homes.

But, flowers encased in ice? I never thought of that as a possibility. It's both scary and quite beautiful.

For those in the EDM Network who are affected - I hope you are able to stay warm and ride out the storm in safety.

UPDATE: I had a go at re-creating one of the flowers digitally, and sampled the colours from the photo itself. I'm certainly gaining confidence with the software and I really enjoyed this piece - especially 'painting' a frame to finish it off :)

Digital Tree

This is a little bit different to my usual style! I've been playing around with various art tools in the ArtRage software, and came up with this. It's a digital combination of pencil, pen and airbrush. I've also used different layers for the background and foreground.

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this image. It seems a bit dark and broody. Bizarrely, I was thinking about Christmas when I did this!

I'm starting to get used to the Wacom tablet now. It's a strange way to create art if you're used to actually using pencils and brushes, but I do like that you can change your medium halfway through a painting and it won't ruin it. And the 'Undo' function is great. There's something very freeing about that, I know I can be as loose and experimental as I like and I'm not wasting good art materials. I think this is the greatest benefit of the tablet, although it's a whole new learning curve to transfer what I've learned with traditional methods to software. I feel like I'm learning to draw all over again!

Yellow Pepper - Old School Style-ee

Another day, another experiment! This time it was masking fluid on this watercolour. I like the effect, but I still felt compelled to add a little pen over the top for definition. The pre-pen version is below. It just didn't look, well, finished...

Quote #1

It isn't about perfection...

...it should be about enjoying yourself! When I'm feeling a bit uninspired, this seems to work for me: draw the first colourful thing you see, as quick as you can, then colour it with the brightest colours in your palette. Hence the cat's scratching post-thingy. I did over-do it a bit with the Paynes Gray, but I guess that's what happens when you play fast and loose with a paintbrush!

I'm now loving the 'scratch-pen'! I like how chaotic this picture is; it seems to reflect how battered the scratcher really is.

I'm off to volunteer at the Station Cinema in Richmond later. This afternoon it's an inspired double-bill of 'Ratatouille' and 'The Wizard of Oz'... yes, THAT one! ON THE BIG SCREEN. Geeeeee-nius!

And just to top off the Christmas spirit, it just started snowing!

No art today...

I think I've overdone it recently! And I've been a little busy. However, I did pop into Gilpins Art Shop in Richmond and picked up a dip pen, or 'scratch pen' as one artist in there commented, very apt - it is a noisy way to draw!

I have no idea how to use it artistically - obviously I get that you 'dip' the pen into ink and then draw with it, I'm just a little uninspired. Any suggestions would be very welcome.

Have a great Friday xx

My first piece of digital art

I've been playing around with my little Wacom tablet and ArtRage 2.0. Interesting result. I'm not sure that it will ever replace my love of proper paints though...

Oil Pastel Experiment

This is my first quick try at drawing with oil pastels. They're metallic, so they have a lovely shimmer in real life but the scanner seems to have killed the subtle sheen in this image! Shame.

This is a combination of different layers of only five pastel colours, with the earlier layers being treated with white spirits (we didn't have any turps in class today, which you're supposed to use). The end effect was everyone in the class had a great time because we were all as high as kites on the fumes! I'm not sure if it improved our efforts...

I now have a headache. I'm going to lie down.

Have a lovely day xxx

UPDATE: Here's a picture of a few members of the Hudswell Art Class - Merry Christmas ladies and I'll see you on January 10th for the next term :)

Just the one Miu - a study

This is the left one. I love these sandals. If I didn't live in Yorkshire, I'd wear them all year round.

I drew this in pencil first, and I'm surprised at how much more confident I now am. Although, when I inked it I wanted to scan it in - just in case I ruined it with paints!

I think the paints worked out ok. The sandals are leather and I was really trying to go for a textured appearance, as well as trying to record how floppy and well-worn they are. The stones aren't quite what I would like them to look like yet.

I might do a wee bit more work on them when the paper is fully dried, but I like the effect so far.

I am LOVING art! It's taken a good while to get the basics, but the effort is worthwhile. BLISS.

Brighten up your Desktop

[Especially for Chantelle, but also for everyone else who wants to brighten their day]

I've just put this onto my computer desktop, and it's really made my screen chirpy! If you want to do the same, click on the image, then right click and click 'set as background'. My background is set to 'tile' images.

Here's the pre-pink version too, just in case you don't fancy being quite so bright.

Enjoy!

Grow your own

I think I've got some kind of lurgy today. I was volunteering at The Station Cinema in Richmond last night and got a bit of a chill during 'The Darjeeling Ltd'.

So, I'm armed with my colourful teapot [see post below for a piccie of it] filled to the brim and a determination that the lurgy is not going to set in. [The whole teapot/film irony is amusing me!]

I'm going to see a preview of 'The Golden Compass' tomorrow night, and I don't want to infect the entire theatre. If anyone has any ideas for remedies, please let me know!

Drawing hearts always cheers me up. I like the idea of them growing and I tend to think them being like trees. Smaller hearts grow as green heart-leaves from the branches and eventually mature into the full blown red blooms when they're good and ready.

Hope you have a lovely day. xxx

Statue

I've had this replica mini statue for years. A friend of mine, Margaret, gave it to me for Christmas some time back in the last century, and I've never really known what to do with it. It's adorned various pieces of furniture in homes all over the country, but it's never really had a purpose... until now. She's fabulous to draw!

I used a very soft Derwent pencil, a 6B I think, and followed the flow lines of the body curves. I love the way that the roughness of the sketching paper lends an extra element of texture.

Thank you for all the comments and emails about my little teapot. I think a lot of people felt that they needed a little colour yesterday. So did I!

Hmmm.... I can feel another loose and colourful picture coming on....

Have a lovely day xxxx

ART IS FUN!

I've decided that today is far too wet, cold and miserable to concentrate on perspective, so I've had a little break and played fast and very, very loose with my new Cotman colours instead.

[Contented Sigh] Far more relaxing.....

Battling with the Abbey

This is the spectacular, breathtaking and utterly charming Rievaulx Abbey. [I think it's pronounced REE-VOH] The Heritage Trail has a great history of it here.

The picture is from a calendar my art teacher has, so I'd like to credit Richard Watson for his fabulous photo.

Incredibly, she's [I've decided that something this lovely and delicate MUST be female] celebrating her 875th birthday this year, as she was originally built in 1132, but fell into disrepair after the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII in 1538.

I made the classic mistake in art class this week of falling in love with the possibilities of recreating the abbey's perspective - whilst totally disregarding my lack of skill in the area! As I've said before, I like a challenge and this one is certainly stretching me.

This is my progress so far. I have used pencil to start with [I definitely felt the need for a safety net] and started to ink in the lines yesterday with my trusty Staedlter Mars 0.18mm.

It's a pretty big piece, I really struggled to fit it onto the scanner, and ended up chopping off half of her east wing! And since I started inking, I've noticed just how wonky my lines are around the windows. But, as a whole, I'm starting to like it! It's a major investment in time and energy, but I do feel that I'm learning and getting better as I do it.

The bottom middle section is the next challenge. It's mostly snow covered rubble, so I'm going to have to get clever about trying to depict this with depth, as opposed to just a scribbly mess! I'm thinking of strategically placing the snow to depict the depth as white areas, which I've already started to pencil in.

If anyone has any other ideas or advice, please do chip in with the comments... [HEEEEELPPPP!]

Right. I'm now a whole pot of tea into the day and I'm twitching to get started, wish me luck and have a fabulous day yourselves!

Happy Saturday/December!

The weekend is here and thankfully the torrential rain and [near] hurricane of last night has calmed down. Freezing rain and wind - kind of comforting in a time of global warming, at least it feels like December!

I think the recent cold has influenced me to warmer climes. Today's drawing is one one of the four massive statues at the entrance to Abu Simbel, possibly the most impressive Eqyptian monument I saw in my time there [yes, even more impressive than the pyramids]. Click here for a fabulous photo showing the sheer scale of the monument.

There are four statues that tower over you as you enter the temple, with a tiny replica of these inside at the back. For one day a year, the sun was in the right position to cast rays into the temple and onto the mini-statues heads, one at a time. Mathematically mind-blowing. [Unfortunately, when the temple was moved from its original position, as they were flooding the valley to create a new reservoir, the architects never managed to work out the correct positioning and the sun no longer annually 'blesses' each of the figures - still, its impressive that the entire monument was saved and reconstructed so faithfully.]


So to the drawing part. GOOD GRIEF was it hard! I drew from a photograph and found the perspective incredibly challenging. I know there are areas on it that are totally off, but thankfully the whole looks reasonably balanced. I also decided to 'strap on a pair' [artistically speaking] and draw directly with ink, rather than taking the easier route by starting and perfecting with pencil before committing the drawing forever with ink.

I'm chuffed to bits with it. It's way better than I thought it would be, and I think the struggle of drawing such a hard piece, without a pencil safety net, made the experience so much more thrilling. When I showed it proudly to my art teacher, Penny, she started mentioning looking at studying an Art Foundation course..... GOTTA love feedback like that!

My drawing of the beautiful, crumbling ruin Rievaulx Abbey is sitting in the corner of the room at the moment, beckoning me to dare to venture over and continue it. Why I am attracted to such difficult pieces, I have no idea. Well, yeah, I do. It's the thrill of the challenge, the 'white-water rafting' style highs and lows as it progresses, and the absolute sense of achievement when the final image works out better than I hoped. [So far I've only abandoned one picture because I really felt that I couldn't rescue it!]

So why am I worried? Kettle's on. Coffee's imminent and I'm just going to strap on a pair of caffeine-fuelled balls and just do it.