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.

new book

This week I've been working on my new portfolio book. Actually it's a photo book, I thought it would be a good format to keep all of my work in but without having to carry a huge portfolio around with me. It's my second book, the first I did a soft cover which sold well to those who know me. This I thought I would keep for my self as a complete work/portfolio. It's not really the done thing when presenting Art but times are changing so why not. It would normally only contain my best work, but as there are no words and no statement in it, I thought it would show some kind of progression. And perhaps a glimmer of things I'm capable of. It did highlight, how far I'd come with my skill range and where I want to be in the future.

As I finished putting the book together I felt I should now start writing some e-books on the subjects of basics and development of skills. So with that I also need to create some DVDs while I'm working on paintings.

I'm going to research the Internet for all those holes that haven't been filled properly in the art section, my students tell me that I have a far simpler way of explaining things that they can understand and use. they also suggested writing books on the subjects of the human head and figures. So this may well be my next step on getting my work out there.

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The fairies above are some of a series I've been working on for a client that lives in Dubai, They are to be reprinted to make decoupage images, so keep your eye out for these. I might use some of them to create a diary/calendar. These started as drawings which were then washed with very pale colour to allow me to control the overall design at leisure. Then I was able to play around with some of the details which I hadn't spent time developing until i needed to. for skin tones I use my favoured permanent rose and green gold, with the odd touch of opera rose and burnt sienna, any dark areas are tackled with dioxazine purple.

The start of another portrait - who says you need to use skin tones. I used mixes of turquoise and and permanent rose  to start the base coats with the edition of some green, I can limit the palette and experiment more. The original paper is bamboo, which lends itself quite well to a semi wet technique, where by I can splash the paper first with random colour patches, then move them if necessary. When dry I can then draw over the splashes and place the features where i want them. I'm happy with the 1st layer, as now I have something to work with, build on and corrections can be made easily. 

thanks for reading!!

3 Months later!

I cant believe it's 3 months since I blogged, and what have I achieved in this time? when i sit down and look at the work I've done I see a massive growth in my ability to deal with commissions. I have to question the way in which I interpret these commissions, but one of them is quite tight on what they specify. Although this is challenging it can be very restrictive when your trying to visualize something from some Else's imagination. Which in my case has lead to me spending hours and hours working on pieces just to be told I've got it something wrong. Then its back to the drawing board !!
February the family go to Antigua loaded with my art gear, and managed to do almost no painting, took 1700 photos instead. While I was there I came up with a plan to paint the people and living accommodation of the island, with a view to having a solo exhibition the following year. Haven't started yet - got home armed with a to do list that would require me to hand my notice in for one of my jobs so that I can concentrate more on the commissions and get some time for the exhibition work. But hows this -the week we  come home the phones ringing and I've picked up another commission, yet another from the world of fantasy! Love these kinds of things. 12 of them to be exact. With the other long term commission still running and all the titles for it needing painting I've had to work flat out to create 12 little people with wings and with only a month to do them in. It was my fault that it was only a month- i had  some stupid idea that I could just knock them up from imagination and that would be that. FOOL!! When I'd started drawing them, some appeared on the paper quite naturally but the majority of them required some development, the characters hadn't really come out in them in the first few sketches and more time was needed to get them come to life. Thank god I didn't have to do them in oil I'd never got them dry in time, as it was I didn't complete all of them on time and need an extension.
Add to that I have agreed to demonstrate at a craft fair on the 9th of April, so I need to work like stink to make enough work to take with me to sell and decide on a topic to paint while there. Check out http://www.thecreativefair.com/ come have a look, lots of demonstrators  and stalls full of wares.  Perhaps I should stick with the fantasy art as i don't own a lot of my art of that genre. Thanks for reading! feel free to comment on any of the content.

Happy New Year Everyone!

It's that time of year again when I can look back and ask myself "what did I achieve?" Well to be quite frank no where near as much as I'd put on my list, as usual started things, got way laid and never finished them. Things like the website - still not finished, commissions still going but not finished, working on some of the paintings I'd like to do, My next book, not even got the basic notes written up!.
I've worked alot this year in Ink and Acrylic but I feel the need to get back to watercolours - with it's unpredictable marks that leave you chuckling to yourself, because you know your going to tell everyone it's meant to be like that!!
Yesterday I managed to get down some words for my next book but that's as far as it's got, I want to do a book on working commissions and "working in shadows" however I think i'm going to be chasing my tail again as I write my new year's list of goals.
Whats on your list?? mine reads like the andrex roll including lose weight for Holiday, finish commission, finish website, sell more work, do solo exhibition and student via teacher exhibition, write books and that's not the half of it. So that's where I'm off to now write more on that list. See you all in the new year - where I hope to be doing more demonstrations that i can upload to the blog, if i can remember to stop and take the pictures in the first places

my way!

This week has seen me tackling some oils and pastels in my classes.
I'd almost forgotten how much fun pastels can be. They're so spontaneous and mucky!!
It's probably the one media that you can get very realistic effects without much effort. Using these can make sketching much quicker and as there is no drying time involved, you can produce a number of finished pieces in less time.
this month i have managed to finish one large flower painting, which my daughters have absconded with to their bedroom. I'm still working on my commissions, the project is slow as every glaze on every character has to dry before the next. For those who know me, know I don't do very small paintings and these paintings have a lot of small details on them, which also slows my progress down, but the end is in sight. Just one and 1/2 characters to go and a little tweaking here and there and I'm done.

I hope that this next year will see me produce more of my own work and maybe I'll get more of the work out there. I'd like to produce another book next year that's based on the process of creating art rather than the finished article. I noted even while working commissions that if I neglect to follow the process I make some monumental mistakes, that require a part or all of the painting to be repainted.
I have made some of the most stupidest mistakes, through not concentrating properly on my process/procedure.
There have been mistakes which I really have no excuses for - moral of story! have a plan, make sure it works and stick to it.
A plan like, research first, sketches and exploration next, colour studies and tonal thumbnails, followed by a quicker full colour small version, in a quicker drying media, then make any corrections cogitate on it for a while or let the client if there is one do the cogitating. Although many artists have their own way of working they will eventually introduce their own way of working that keeps their work at it s best.
Whats yours??

update on web building

i cant believe that is nearly November and i still haven't finished my website more to the point I haven't even finished one single painting I've started.
As I'm still working on some commissions its been nion impossible to get any other work done or for that matter started!
Needless to say I haven't started the Christmas cards for this year, and time is running out. Last years cards were negative space paintings which turned out rather well. This year will be touch and go whether I get any done in at all. The original plan was to paint some small Victorian  vignettes, in monochrome with just a splash of colour somewhere.
My commission work is coming on well but is slow going as there is a lot of small detail on two of the paintings. And as I don't have all day everyday to work on them, due to teaching, they will have to take precedence over other things. 
Recently some of my students have asked do some fantasy art with me, which is quite refreshing as this is where i started and where most of my commission work is. I drew a fairy with some pitcher plants and painted part of them in watercolour. Some of the best fantasy art I've seen has been those which include something from reality, whether this be an object or building etc added to the composition. I like the idea of using siomthing that we are familiar with in there so there something more beilevable to begin with, it makes the job a little easier. check out some of the artist on the http://www.imaginefx.com/ you'll find some of the best in the world here and you can access some workshops while your about it!
happy painting!!