Finished at last

This week saw the start of my summer classes, all of which needed some prep for each of the classes. Not only in the advertising but in the lesson planning. The classes were centered around drawing watercolour and Thursdays will be Oils, so quite a mix of techniques and media going on. As the classes are only 3 hours long it's hard to get a completed piece of work for most students but the results were excellent, next week they will be completing a full tonal drawing which I think they will be impressed with. Today's watercolour class was using bold colours and learning to lift out. Not a class for the faint hearted!! This really throws students in at the deep end. Cant wait for Thursdays lesson Oil portraits.
During the time I've been working on the getting the classes up and running I've also continued to work on the piece below.....

I have finally finished the Large piece entitled " Stealing the wings of butterflies" you'll see from my last blog that I was a fair way into it, but still had a ton to do. Well since the last photo, i completed our heroine first with a white hair do then changed my mind back to red. while painting I realised that I would have been better do this in oils rather acrylics I'm much happier with slow drying paint - I don't need to make any adjustments for the paint drying darker or lighter.

 

I glazed over the white with burnt sienna, transparent red oxide and burnt orange. i was a little happier once this was finished - making changes half way through a painting can mess other areas up. Next was the wings hanging on the pole and guess what I did here?
Started with one colour and ended up with another, check out the black wing -this was too dark for the overall composition so that had to be changed.

With the lighter wing in place i carried on putting the insects in some of which are made from glass.
The glass beads are made by a good friend of mine at http://www.flowerjasper.co.uk/ a very talented bead maker.
This is what happens to the broken ones!

perfect for little bugs!!

A little white moth not finished in this photo.

base coats on for the Centinakes

Add some mist and tweak here and there and we're finished Thanks for joining me

New Beginnings

This month starts the first month ever in my entire adult life where I no longer work for the youth Service, you'd think having worked nearly 3 decades for them they'd let me with just a months notice - only they didn't i had to work 3. now that it is over I'm concentrating on my summer programme, where i will be teaching drawing, watercolours and oils.I may also start up another private class in the evening in my local town.
So now i have more time to work on my own work where shall i start?????????
I wrote myself a list at the beginning of the year of all the things I wanted to paint, then I kept adding to that to that list and now it's got over a hundred items on it!
I want to continue with my fairies and angels and dragons and insects and write a small book on skin tone and .......................... I've exhausted myself just looking at the list. Oh and then there's the list of creatures that my client gave me to see what I could come up with.
So what did I decide on? doing my usual combination trick, if i cant do all the list then I find ways to combine different elements, which lead me to this -

 

 The drawings from my sketch book, this is not as planned out as it first looks ( I should have done a tonal sketch to see how the light would fall.  Moral of story don't take short cuts - you'll see why in another blog.

The drawing below is also from the same series, yup it turned into a series of drawings overnight. The series  title of is "Stealing the wings of Butterflies" all will become apparent as we go with the paintings.

The first colour washes for the background completed - yes they are floating leaves in the sky, I also limited the palette here to just a few colours such as lemon yellow titanium white, sap green and green gold. Being a bit eager I rushed the drawing copying from my sketch book and not making many adjustments.

I wash on base tones for the skin in burnt sienna and white. this just lets me play with the sculpting part of the body before rendering the skin properly. 

As you can see the tummy going well!!!  and I've started to base coat other areas such as the trousers, shirt and boots. What I haven't told you is the canvas is 100 x 50 cm and is over half my height, remember what I said about not cutting corners! well if you look carefully you'll see that the legs aren't long enough because I didn't spend the extra time i normally would checking these things. Drawing below your waistline is not conducive to great proportions- let that be a lesson to you!!

I had to repaint all of the lower half  to correct my mistake!

I'll show you rest on the next blog.