Birth and Dragons

Seeking inspiration for my 'painting day' - 

yes, Monday is my day a week set aside for painting, which of course means I spend half the day painting the other half walking the dog, fiddling around with paperwork, doing laundry and hoovering looking at Facebook and watching TV 

 - I came across the latest Hubble Telescope image of the birth of a star. It is a stunning image: /http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/potw1144a/ 

and I did my best to recreate the feel of it using acrylic and pastel. I didn't try to be accurate with star positioning etc, I just wanted to get the sense of the brilliance of the star and the soft swirl of the dust particles. I was pretty pleased with the reults though I can't claim it as original as I could not have produced it without seeing the Hubble photo.

I then went on to try out another Nebulae image, it started life as a simple dust cloud which then started to look like a dancer but prettty soon became a dragon - I added a little more yellow and red into the space around the nebula and am happy with it. Dragon Nebula, of course.

In the first painting I masked out the stars then painted a blend of black, yellow, blue and red gradually smudging in white and opaque yellow then finally adding the white pastel halo around the stars and the highlights on the dust cloud. In the second one, I had already got a piece of watercolour paper that I had used up my palette contents on last week so masked out the orange and yellow stars, painted flat black over it, added some white and yellow smudges then used a mapping pen and white acrylic ink to mark in the other stars, again using pastel for the clouds and halos. The first technique worked better.

Of squid, silhouettes and bluebells.

It's been a busy few weeks in my creative world.

I took on the challenge of running a 4 week workshop, on Animals in Movement, with the Wilmington Art Group - it's an unusual format but seems to work. They hire a tutor to come along to their friday sessions, which run from 10-2, to work on a particular theme. The tutor comes for 2 fridays, the group then works on their own on the 3rd friday, the tutor returns on the 4th friday and ends the session with a critique.

Now, all members have their own favourite media so, although I was demonstrating on the first week how I portray swimming koi in Acrylics, the group then translated the techniques to watercolour, pencil, inks and chalk pastels with interesting effect. In each session I covered a different topic -fish in water using the 'background' of the water as part of the image to create the sense of movement,  birds in flight using blurring of wings and extending lines, and finally  swimming turtles, concentrating on colour and light contrasts.

The results from the group were amazing - doing a critique was difficult, as usual, but there were so many strong paintings that the hardest thing was not talking about each one for too long!

 

I now, of course, have several unfinished paintings that I started for the demonstration part of the workshops - 2 koi, one bluetits, one turtles. Peversely I want to do something different but keep to the 'animals in movement' theme so have started a painting of Squid. Searching the internet I found some lovely video footage which I'm using for my inspiration. Alive, they are strange but beautiful and graceful creatures. I'm just strugglng a bit to stop them looking too cute and catoon-like as they have quite large boggley eyes

And I am finally getting to do some more design work with Hailsham Creative - having taken on the burden of the interminable admin, coupled with the fact that I have my own office with a PC (tut!) in it rather than a MAC, I rarely get to actually do any of the creative stuff. But, our lovely local vet wants their branding looked at so I have been given the task of drawing silhouettes of horse, cow, cat and dog - not in movement, sadly. I also designed the latest Gallery North flier, for their upcoming Winter Exhibtion and drew bluebells for the 2012 Arlington Bluebell Walk brochures.

Talking of bluebells, I also finally managed to find time to pop round to the Arlington Village Hall to re-paint the bluebells on the hall sign - a pleasant hour spent in the sunshine on Monday with birds singing all around me. 

There was no Art Goup this week, but we will be back in session next week - the theme, strangely enough is 'All Hallowe's Eve'  now, how to make squid fit the bill...

The finished Squid (31/10/11)

Hailsham High Street Exhibition

These pictures are currently in an exhibition in 'Wear Else' in Hailsham High Street.

Closing date for the Exhibition is 6th January 2012

New window display

Thanks to selling one of the pictures on show in the Wear Else window in Hailsham High Street, I have had a change around so you can now see more of my animal portraits including 'Picatso'.Pop along and have a look, there are plenty more art displays in other shop windows including Jingles, Smiles and Apollo.