Spent a few days in Cumbria this week with very intermittent Internet access, which has been really nice, relaxing. The weather was lovely so I went walking and sketching with my Khadi landscape sketchbook, Inktense blocks and reservoir brush. Here’s a view from Birkrigg Common.
SATURDAY, 29 APRIL 2023 FROM 16:00-18:00
Author Dewi Bowen and myself will be signing Dewi’s new book “Hunting The Wild Megalith”, featuring artwork by me, at the gorgeous Workers Gallery in The Rhondda Valley. There will of course, be cake and refreshments! Come and chat to me and Dewi about our escapades across the years, the horizontal rain and snow, the Welsh mud, and the sandwich-obsessed Welsh ponies we met as I suffered for our art.
Come and spend a Saturday up the lovely Rhondda Valley and get yourself a helping of cake, art, literature and standing stones. More about the event here.
Please note that only registered Assistance Dogs are able to be on the premises.
Sparta Puss has been posing quite a bit lately, and I’ve been taking photographs and playing around with them in Adobe Photoshop. Here she is lying on a nice woven blanket and I’ve put the photo through the Water Paper filter.
I’ve started applying the paint to one of my new paintings. On top of the orange ground, I’ve scraped on a few areas of Titanium White, with a palette knife, which will be the highlights. It’s going to be another nocturne.
I did a bit more to the canvasses I’ve been recycling. I have a couple of ideas for paintings so I used Liquitex Heavy Body opaque Cadmium Orange to lay down a background colour. I don’t like working on top of white, I find it intimidating. I’ve used the orange a few times now and it gives a lovely warmth to the finished painting.
I recycled a couple of canvasses I didn’t like a while back, ready for some new painting projects. I scraped a load of acrylic gesso over the surfaces, deliberately leaving them textured. Then I daubed one of them with some leftover pinks and purples from another painting I’m working on – waste not want not. This is the one I’ll continue with.
I carried on with my portrait of Sparta Puss today, but concentrated on the still-life bits – the chocolate tin and toiletries. I think all the components are now in place, I just have to refine them with several layers of thin washes and I need to knock back most of the light bits.
I’m painting with Liquitex Heavy Body acrylics onto a 40 x 40 cms stretched canvas using brushes by Daler-Rowney, Winsor & Newton and Isabey.
I went to a raku firing yesterday and as well as decorating and glazing some small pieces I also had a scribble. The potter spent some time on the ground, looking under the kiln. I don’t know why she was doing it, but it was a great pose to draw.
I spent a great afternoon decorating some little ceramic figures for a raku firing today. Local ceramicist Esther Ley opened her garden and studio and provided some tiny bisque-fired houses and small birds to be decorated with oxides and glazes. Once we’d finished decorating, the little clay objects were fired in a spectacular outdoor kiln, then plunged into a mini-dustbin full of sawdust and newspaper before being washed off to reveal the subtle crackling and metallic hues typical of raku pottery.
A few more sketches from the other evening of performances at Taliesin Arts Centre. It’s good to have access to bodies in motion, I usually draw people in cafes or audiences or work with life models. I worked very quickly with a continuous line, mostly.
scribblah 