KITTENS!!!!

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.

Gors Fawr, near Mynachlog-ddu in the Preseli mountains, a lush green bog fringed with glowing hills.

 

Easy Exercise

Hope

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.

Gors Fawr, near Mynachlog-ddu in the Preseli mountains, a lush green bog fringed with glowing hills.

Getting Somewhere

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.

Gors Fawr, near Mynachlog-ddu in the Preseli mountains, a lush green bog fringed with glowing hills.

 

Taking A Break

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.

Some of The Plebeian Printmakers – Melvyn Williams, Patricia McKenna-Jones, Hannah Lawson and Chris Harrendence

 

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.

A Portable, Pop-up Revolution

This is a fascinating read and a beautiful collage

 

 

Source: A Portable, Pop-up Revolution

Complex Fragments

Scribble 2

I’ve zoomed in on parts of the random scribbles I’ve been doing over discarded screenprints lately. These fragments are complex images in their own right. I’ll probably end up using them for collages but for the moment I’m enjoying them as they are.

 

 

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.

Back To Scribbling

Scribble 1

I returned to scribbling onto recycled prints today. This is an old screenprint that I didn’t like when I did it but it’s on a gorgeous Zerkall paper that’s too good to throw away, so I scribbled all over it. I took some digital photos of the result and here is a small section of it that  I photographed digitally. I spend a lot of time on these seemingly random scribbles, working into many of the marks with my fingers to soften and smudge. I used top quality Daler Rowney soft pastels.

 

 

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.

Getting Darker

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I’m carrying on drawing experimentally on top of a little watercolour sketch I did en plein air a couple of days ago. I uploaded it onto my Samsung Galaxy Note 8 tablet into a free Markers drawing app and I’m working over it with cross-hatching and scribbling. The version I did yesterday is better than my original, which was very wishy washy and mundane, but today I took it a few stages darker and I’m liking it more. I’m going to keep working over it to see how dark I can go before I lose the subject all together.

I think it’s an important part of the creative process to take time out to experiment, to play with no pressure to meet deadlines or conform to the brief of a commission. I’m not keen on using either watercolours or digital drawing apps, but they’re good as a means to an end, trying out new ideas that might lead somewhere.

 

 

I am putting my series of drawings of ancient Welsh monuments on Artfinder.  If you’d like to see them, please click on the image below or the Artfinder link at the top right of this page.

St Elvis

Wishy Washy

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I’ve been having a go at watercolours recently, since I won a really nice St. Cuthbert’s Mill Saunders Waterford glued watercolour block in a Facebook competition. I’m not really into painting but this is lovely paper and there’s a lot of it and, frankly, waste not, want not, as my Nana used to say. Husb and I stayed over in Lampeter yesterday, a mini staycation, and there was a lovely view from our room, but I’m always a bit stumped where to start with landscape so I decided to just block in areas of colour without being too worried about details. I used Winsor & Newton half pans. It was a very overcast and misty morning today and the colours were very soft and muted and to be honest, way too wishy-washy for my liking.

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When I got home, I photographed it onto my Samsung Galaxy Note tablet and loaded it into my free Markers app and started scribbling over it. I feel a lot happier with the overlaid cross hatching and scribbled textures, but I think I need to go further; I think I need to work over it again and make it really dark and Gothic with just some tiny flecks of colour showing through. Something to do tomorrow.

 

 

I am putting my series of drawings of ancient Welsh monuments on Artfinder.  If you’d like to see them, please click on the image below or the Artfinder link at the top right of this page.

St Elvis

Putting It Together

Making an artwork can sometimes be quick and spontaneous but is often a set of processes that finally come together. That’s the way I developed the collage that I made yesterday at the Mill Lane Arts Week in Cardiff. I rummaged around in my plans chest for old discarded prints that hadn’t worked out to my satisfaction, linocuts and screenprints, the paper is too good to waste so they get squirreled away to be reused.

Millane 3
I worked on top of a large discarded linocut and collaged a fragment of a two-colour screenprint that hadn’t worked out.

 

Over the previous week, I had been scribbling over some unused screenprints and also some vintage papers with Daler Rowney soft pastels, working randomly building up layers of colour and texture. I used these extensively to build up detail on my collage.

 

So my final piece started some years ago with disappointment in the print studio – happy accidents.

Millane 4

 

 

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.