Ho ho ho!

The big day is drawing near: we now have our Christmas tree up, all gift shopping is complete and items are wrapped, all international cards were sent by the postal dates (yay!), little chap has only three days more at school, our Christmas meat order and veg box order have been submitted, and I have even been caught humming the odd Christmas tune or two!



Christmas came early for me, actually, as I received a wonderful package from Katie at L'aubergine joyeuse. We agreed to make each other a scarf and exchange them for the winter months. I knitted a silk scarf in Autumn jewel colours from The Yarn Gallery. I also included some small trinkets to make a surprise package. Katie crocheted me a lambswool scarf in purple (a favourite colour of mine) and included some gorgeous handmade glass beads in her package to me. I was delighted and have been busy planning how I am going to use them. The scarf has already had many an outing. It is slim and long, which is just perfect as I can wrap it a 2 or 3 times round my neck and it fills the space between collar and skin perfectly. Thank you Katie!



I have had a lot of time to myself this weekend, as the older lad brought a friend up to visit, so all the boys (including little chap) went off to the football yesterday, and this morning Guinness Man has taken little chap swimming at the local pool. It has been nice to have this time, and yesterday I managed to get out my paints for the first time in months. I was pleased with the results... and the colours give it quite a wintry feel, so it might form the basis of some cards next year.



I am glad to be seeing this year draw to a close. It has been a hard year, and there has been much disruption to our normal family routine. I am looking forward to turning the corner and facing life afresh in 2008.



I took little chap and his friend to the school disco on Thursday night... it raised £250 for the school playground refurbishment, and was a lot of fun. Little chap is also having his first sleepover here next week (after school has broken up!). He is so grown up now!

Rural France

I managed to keep my Wednesday date with my paintbrushes today, and here is the result. I am moderately pleased with this. There was a bit more in the foreground, but it suffered my usual vagueness, so I cropped it.

Here is the whole thing for comparison... thoughts?

Oh I do like to be beside the seaside

I managed to put aside some time yesterday to sit and paint and enjoy. I seem drawn at the moment to try to capture my childhood experiences of holidays on the Lincolnshire coast. I am also trying to learn how to suggest distance and form with gradients of colour, and small indistinct marks, rather than lots of detailed brush strokes.

I quite like this picture, although I think the line of the sea needs to be less broken, and perhaps there needs to be something more for the eye to focus on.

Holiday inspiration

I had a day of painting today, which was lovely. I am experimenting with some dilute acrylic mix on gesso, the idea for which I got from Judy Scott. And have also taken some memories from my recent holiday to inspire me to get back to the fun of painting in watercolour (something which has eluded me for a few weeks now).

We stayed in a farm cottage on our holiday and every day was filled with the sights and sounds of swallows and sky larks. It was beautiful (despite the very wet weather!). Anyway - here is my attempt to capture some wonderful moments.

Another attempt...

So, mid ground and background brush strokes, and to an extent colours, are still eluding me. But here is my latest attempt at a painting. I am pleased to have included trees, buildings AND a PERSON!!!! in this picture.

I like the fineness of the work on the buildings. I see all the mistakes in the mid ground trees, but am not sure how to correct it. But still, overall, I am quite pleased.

This was homework, so I will see what teacher says tomorrow....

Tomorrow's lesson is a foray into acrylics... Yikes!

Art class week 7

The challenge today was to paint a picture in water colour from a picture or photograph of our choice.

Mine is of an Australian outback farm building.

I really enjoyed doing this picture, and I learned a lot about mark making in the foreground, mid-ground and background.

In my art class, I am sitting next to a young Muslim girl. She is very interested in drawing objects from her culture, and today she brought in an ornate brass coffee pot to do a painting of. It was lovely, she got the shape beautifully.

There is also an interesting fellow who sits the other side of the class from me. He looks like John Prescott, and is quite gruff. He likes to do Turner style pictures, and boasted that he took the same approach to painting with watercolour as he does to emulsioning. He is odd, because he pretends to be a beginner and declare that everything is too technical and too complicated for him, and yet he gives away, through his comments, the fact that he knows a lot about painting and art.

Anyway, a most enjoyable session today.

Homework - trees of green

This week I have managed to do a piece of homework for my art class. I wanted to use the colour theory we learned a week ago to produce a range of shades of green that could be used to convey distance. The brighter, purer greens being foreground colours, and muted ("greyer") greens in the distance.

Our art teacher insists that we use a palette of only 6 colours (2 yellow, 2 blues and 2 reds) and mix all our shades from first principles. That way we understand what we are doing with colour.

My attempt below is a little confused, but the basic elements are there. Disastrously, I changed tack part way through, and so some of the colour ranges I had established became wrong in relation to the other items I was putting into the picture. So, for example, although the foreground trees have good foreground colours, the greens immediately around them are more mid-ground, and some of the mid ground colours come too far forwards. I also struggle with changing the brush strokes I use to help to convey distance. I need to work on a range of different brush marks.

Art week 6

Today we tried applying last week's colour theory to a still life in water colour. I did not do very well! I found it very difficult today... I could have spent all morning on the sketch, let alone try and deal with the colour.

Anyway the good points are, I like some of the texture I achieved on the taller jar, and the reflected colour from the apple. Overall, though, I was disappointed.

On a more exciting note, today is the closing date for applications to SP10, and so in the next 2 weeks I should find out who I am going to be secret pal to (i.e. the person I will be sending stuff to) and I will also be allocated to someone who will then send stuff to me (i.e. they will be the secret pal to me). It's exciting. I have been on the lookout for nice things to send to my pal, and am looking forward to finding out what she likes and what she does.

Art class 2

Today was the second lesson of the term. There was snow on the ground, so I was unsure how many people would make it, especially as a large proportion of the class are elderly and/or infirm. Anyway, there were 12 of us, including one who didn't make it last week, and a completely new chap whose acrylic painting course had been cancelled, so he had signed up for our class belatedly.

It is always the case that newcomers to the course bring nothing on the first day - not a scrap of paper nor a pencil. The college advises that the tutor will tell everyone what materials they will need on the first day - but that doesn't help if you are empty handed for a 2 hour drawing lesson! Anyway, the group as usual was very supportive and offered paper and pencils to the new chap. He was determined he would sit out the first lesson and just observe, but Barry (the tutor) cajoled him into giving it a go.

I had the new chap on one side, and on the other side a chap who missed last week as he had an operation on this thumb, and so his arm (left arm thankfully!) was all strapped up.

We knew that the lesson was to be tonal drawing of flowers, but our hearts sank when we saw an array of battered silk flowers including roses, hyacinths, petunias and assorted foliage. Having hated boxes and jugs for so long, we now all felt very fond of the previous uniform objects we had had to draw.

The girl who had longed to draw flowers, was also dismayed as she had to portray them in black and white, when she longs to let rip with the colours of nature.

A major issue with still life in this class, is that it is held in a porta-cabin, with windows on 2 sides, and strip lighting above. So any sense of light source and shadow is very difficult to find and maintain.

Anyway - here is my tonal drawing of roses strewn across a desk next to small wicker basket. I am actually quite pleased with it. Although I missed a trick in choosing a very linear composition, and so I had little scope to try to portray depth in my picture. I like the fact that I drew very few outlines, instead concentrating on the contrast of light and dark. I am also pleased that I did not do a botanical drawing, but instead looked at the overall form of the flowers.



"Dancin' fool" always picks out her favourite element in any of my pictures, and this can be as small as a single petal or the handle of a jug. I look forward to hearing what she has to say, and I admire her ability to look into a picture at elements, and not just glance across a whole surface.

I am also looking forward to having a good friend visit this blog (You know who you are) and hope he will catch the blogging bug!

Where for Art thou?

In 2005 I signed up to an art course "painting and drawing for beginners" at a local college. I had missed the 2004 autumn term, so was joining for the last 2 terms of the academic year (spring and summer). It got off to a very rocky start on my first day, with me almost at the point of lodging a complaint against my tutor for bullying. But our first-week clash was soon forgotten, and I really enjoyed the course. In 2005 I did the autumn term to complete the 3-term course. 2006 was all over the place for me with my little boy starting school, and my father's illness, so I did not manage to rejoin the class.

Today however, I went back (again having missed the first term of the academic year!), and had a really good time. Two of the class were still there from Sept 2005, and one even from Jan 2005, but the others were new faces. It's an interesting mix of people and I will tell you more about them as the weeks progress. Today I identified:

2 petrified newbies;

2 old dears who chat and back chat all the session;

1 die hard technical draughtsman;

1 very interesting Asian woman who according to the tutor draws everything like a tapestry, and whom he is trying to "convert" to western art style;

2 grandmothers who have not drawn since school days and who are being argued out of cross hatching.

That leaves me, another of the returning students from 2005, and 3 absent pupils. I also learned that several of the pupils from previous years have progressed to the intermediate and even advanced courses. I wish them all good luck, and hope I might cross paths with them at the college, I would love to know how they are doing.

Having gossiped about the course, I had better show you what I produced:

Be kind... And tune in next week for more exciting stories from "Art from Charnwood Forest".

Orchids

It was my birthday yesterday, and as part of a pamper myself day, I set aside all afternoon to do some painting. Now usually this would mean emulsioning walls or ceilings. But this time, I got out my watercolours and had a go at painting some orchids which I received for Christmas.

I have mixed feelings about the results. I am pleased with some of the brushwork, but the overall shape of the orchid petals was very difficult, and is not right. The main thing, though, was that it was a very relaxing and enjoyable couple of hours. I have also signed up for another term of a painting and drawing class. I am really looking forward to spending some time each week on artistic pursuits.

A diversion

To start the new year, I am being brave and showing a watercolour painting I did over the Christmas holidays. It was from a photograph in a book.

I took up water colour painting 2 years ago, but have not done any in the last 12 months for one reason and another (mainly my boy starting school and a number of small work projects).

Anyway I liked this one - this is actually just the part of it that my scanner could fit - but I am pleased with the enforced cropping, and shall try playing around with the rest of the picture (there is some moody sky which the scanner chose to ignore, and some more of the hills) until it all comes together. I am also thinking of doing another version with poppies in the fields (a bit like the old Cadbury's flake advert! - can you remember it?).

There is a funny story about my first painting lesson and Dahlias. I mention it to make those in the know laugh...