Just a quick digital scribble of Sparta Puss this evening. I seem to have a cold coming on so all I want to do is curl up in a blanket on the settee and have an early night. This is done in a free app called Markers on my Samsung Galaxy Note 8 tablet.
A lot of my artwork is available on my Artfinder gallery. If you’d like to have a look, please click on the image below or the Artfinder link at the top right of this page.
I took digital photos of the large work I did with oil bars (Winsor & Newton) onto paper (Fabriano Accademica) last week and downloaded one into a free Markers app on my Samsung Galaxy Note 8 tablet. I’m starting to find it quite useful to download artwork in this way, to have a play without having to get out loads of materials and risk spoiling the original. I started drawing with a fine white line, to see what would happen, with no planning and a figure has started to emerge. I wonder where this will take me?
A lot of my artwork is available on my Artfinder gallery. If you’d like to have a look, please click on the image below or the Artfinder link at the top right of this page.
Husb and I were at g39 in Cardiff this evening at the announcement of the Artes Mundi shortlist. This is an internationally focused arts organisation that “identifies, recognises and supports contemporary visual artists who engage with the human condition, social reality and lived experience.” It’s possibly best known for its biennial international Exhibition and Prize which awards a £40,000 prize to the winner.
Of course, I had a scribble…..
Then my pen ran out …..
A lot of my artwork is available on my Artfinder gallery. If you’d like to have a look, please click on the image below or the Artfinder link at the top right of this page.
This started as a very pale watercolour landscape that I uploaded onto my Samsung Galaxy Note tablet into a free Markers app. I’ve been making it darker and darker with cross-hatching and scribbles but I think this is about as dark as I can go with it.
The slides show the process from the original little painting, Winsor & Newton half pans onto St. Cuthbert’s Mill watercolour paper, through to the final, rather Gothic, drawing of darkness. I don’t normally work like this, it’s been good for me to break out of my comfort zone.
A lot of my artwork is available on my Artfinder gallery. If you’d like to have a look, please click on the image below or the Artfinder link at the top right of this page.
I carried on working today at the Creative Bubble artspace in Swansea’s Cradock Street with fellow artist Patricia McKenna Jones. Patricia has taken the space for a few days to develop some new work and invited other artists to join her. I thought I could do with a few days experimenting so I stuck a huge piece of Fabriano Accademica paper on the wall, about 1.5 x 2 metres and started making intuitive marks, first with compressed charcoal and then with Winsor & Newton oil bars.
The mark-making I’m doing isn’t anything new, the Abstract Expressionists were at it throughout the 1940s and 1950s but it’s new for me. I normally work quite formally from life, drawing from things in front of me. It’s a departure for me to work without subject matter, without realism and without an ultimate aim. It was hard on the first day but now, on day 2, I’m relaxing into it.
From the left, today starting with what I did yesterday, mostly compressed charcoal with some streaks of scarlet and a little Alizarin Crimson, then Yellow Ochre, more Alizarin Crimson and finally Hooker’s Green.
Oh …. and I decided to work entirely with my left hand today (I’m right handed) and it made such a difference, I am much more relaxed and intuitive, the marks more varied.
A lot of my artwork is available on my Artfinder gallery. If you’d like to have a look, please click on the image below or the Artfinder link at the top right of this page.
Today I spent a few hours down at The Creative Bubble Artspace, with fellow artist Patricia McKenna-Jones, working on some random scribbles onto very large pieces of paper, I use Fabriano Accademica, a fairly heavy paper (120gsm) with compressed charcoal and Winsor & Newton oil bars. I’m going back tomorrow to carry on so I’ll say more about it then. At the moment I’m plumb tuckered out with looking after kittens.
Kittens! No art. How can I make art with kittens around? We’re looking after two little kittens for some friends while they’re away for the weekend. They’re brothers and a cross between a common-or-garden tabby and a Bengal. Half exotic and all fluff, energy and cuteness overload. Except when they’re running across the computer keyboard when I’m trying to blog. And stealing my pen.
A lot of my artwork is available on my Artfinder gallery. If you’d like to have a look, please click on the image below or the Artfinder link at the top right of this page.
I’ve been running some art sessions locally, developing simple exercises to introduce techniques to people who maybe don’t have much confidence in their abilities at first. I wanted to do something that uses pastels and text so, working on black paper, I encouraged people to make a few simple marks with soft pastels turned on their sides and then write a single word repetitively across the background to create a dynamic texture. Very simple but quite effective, I think, and easily accessible.
A lot of my artwork is available on my Artfinder gallery. If you’d like to have a look, please click on the image below or the Artfinder link at the top right of this page.
I started this little watercolour a couple of weeks ago, when I was in Ceredigion, using Winsor & Newton half pans onto St. Cuthbert’s Mill watercolour paper. I’m not used to watercolours and the scene before me was very pale and misty and I was a bit disappointed by it, to be honest. So I photographed it into my Samsung Galaxy Tablet and started experimenting with a free Markers app, building up layers of black crosshatching over the pale paint. I’m getting somewhere at last.
A lot of my artwork is available on my Artfinder gallery. If you’d like to have a look, please click on the image below or the Artfinder link at the top right of this page.
It’s the holidays, so I’ve had a bit of a break from art and blogging for a few days and now I’m ready to get stuck in again. I helped to set up a window display of prints at Volcano on Swansea’s High Street today, with my fellow Plebeian Printmakers. We took part in the recent ‘Troublemakers Festival’, making prints from manhole covers in the streets and we’re showing them at Volcano through September.
Melvyn made a short film of us making our prints in the street – here it is ….
We’ll be doing it again in Cardiff at the ‘Made In Roath’ arts festival on October 21st. More on that later …
A lot of my artwork is available on my Artfinder gallery. If you’d like to have a look, please click on the image below or the Artfinder link at the top right of this page.
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