Poppy the dog

A black dog is damn hard to draw when the only shape you can see is in reflections... 

Minor adjustments

Portrait Class 3

We had a new 'life' model today, Kirsty. By life, I don't mean naked - it's a portrait course so, thank feck, clothes stay on!

This is my portrait after making an initial sketch, which was finished in oil pastels with a purple brusho background.

Self Portrait No.1

This version enhanced with drawing pens marks and greater depth of shadow and tone.

My original sketch in pencil with brusho colour, which looked a little insipid.

Aragorn pencil drawing

Pencil drawing of face

Portrait course - the skull in mixed media

This was created using many media - predominantly drawing pen, sennelier oil pastels and pencil to take away.

It's been a long time...

Good grief - it's been over a year since I blogged. Very, very lazy. Anyway, today I finally managed to get enrolled onto an art course again, so come February I should have more artistic attempts to put up. I've completed zero pieces since 2008, so it should be interesting to see how I do. Scary!

In other artistic endeavours, I've been helping a friend of mine, who is writing a children's science fiction novel. I'd forgotten how much I enjoy writing and copy editing, and the subject is so much more interesting to read than my old diet of training materials and business documents! It's not paid work, but it is helping me to get back in to the swing of things and I've really missed working with Al :) Happy days!

It might actually get published and kick-start a new career-path for me in publishing, so I'm researching the publishing process in anticipation. So far, the seven chapters Al's completed are fab - so I have high hopes. If I had his imagination, I'd try writing a book myself!

Mixedmediatastic!

I really wasn't sure about doing this, but after the second art class this still life started to spring into life and now I luuuuurve mixed media. This is a massive combination of thin white paper glued as the underlayer to give texture, handmade paper ripped and glued into place for the blue bowl, brown wrapping paper as the wooden poles and some of the leaves, then finished off with a combination of Brusho inks, Derwent Inktense pencils, acrylic paint and Sennelier oil pastels.

I'm waiting for inspiration for the next one now :)

UPDATE:

After Scarlett's comment, I thought it would be a good idea to add in a step-by-step for this piece. It's all about creating different areas of texture to work on later in whichever medium you think suits best! Great fun.

1. I started with an oil pastel board, which is nice and stiff. You can work on anything, but paper does seem to go a bit floppy so I wouldn't recommend it.
   
2. I sketched out the composition with a soft pencil, then decided to add the paper effect to the foreground and background. This is muckily achieved by spreading PVA glue on the area to be covered, then scrunching up tissue paper and then placing it on the area.


3. I also scrunched up some brown tissue and glued it messily into the base of the plantpot as dead leaves. I also added in some green tissue as a few of the leaves and red and pink tissue on the plant pot.


4. I then used brown wrapping paper to cut out the shape of one of the leaves, the stalks of the plant and the struts of the basket (behind the bowl)


5. The bowl was created using handmade nepal paper, ripped into little pieces and then glued into place using my original sketch marks as a guide.
   
6. I then checked all the various bits of paper were well glued down and then left it to dry.

It looked AWFUL - incredibly amateurish, but don't worry, it gets better when you start painting over the top of your base layer. My art teacher explained that the first layer is like a pizza base, which you then add layer and layer on top to create the finished piece.

Once it had all dried, I then started working on each area. The medium you use for each area is down to you - whatever you think works best with each texture.

• For the green leaves, I over-painted the tissue with acrylic paints.
  
• The brown dead leaves were touched up with oil pastels.





• The plant pot is red and pink oil pastel added on top of tissue, with a little defintion around the rim with an inktense pencil.
  
• The Dominos box is just oil pastels and I used an Inktense pencil to write the letters.

• The jug is also oil pastels.





• The bowl is oil pastels added on top in the same colours as the handmade paper. I used a little darker blue to give definition.
  
  

  

• I used inktense pencil and oil pastels on the basket.
  
• The background and foreground are created by adding Brusho watercolour dry pigments, watered down and dabbed over the tissue. I used orange and pink on the wall background and dark brown and black on the foreground to attempt to create the impression of wood. I also added a little oil pastel in orange and pink in areas of the wall for extra colour.

I'm going to finish it off with spray fixative on the areas of oil pastel, then frame it behind glass in a big chunky brown frame with a white mount. Bliss!

In love with oil pastels

I've never really got the point of oil pastels, until I tried to replicate the look of stone of a cottage I lived in some years back. I really don't think I could have achieved it with paint. The windows are diluted Brusho pigments - a combination of green and orange. They dried beautifully! This first attempt was completed on an oil pastel [card]board:

Then, I discovered Art Boards made of maple and Sennelier oil pastels. BLISS. The pastels don't need a primer, so I worked directly onto the wood. I even took down the intensity of some of the colour on the windows and background by sanding.

Just so much fun! There will be more in the coming days... :)

Starting with simple Mixed Media

Lately, I've been mostly pottering around with a combination of Brusho pigments, wax (as a resist) and Inktense pencils. They have the most amazing colours! I scanned this image in above and then mucked about with the colour settings to get something even more intense (below).

Pigments on Mounting Board

This was fun! Art class resumed for the Spring term and today we played with dry watercolour pigments, called Brusho. They're made in Sheffield (just down the road from here). Anyway, great fun. Excellent depth of colour and seriously ink stained fingers :)

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...