Interesting times.

Looking back at the last couple of months I see . . . well . . . not much; here on my blog. I do, however, have an excuse. I've reached a crossroads; at long last I've made the decision that at some level I know I've needed to make for a while, to bin my printing and embroidery business (my primary source of employment and income). It's not a sensible choice but an inevitable one, under my managment the business was doomed to failure, once you find it impossible to motivate yourself to do more than 'just enough', and sometimes not even that, then it's time to roll the dice, to get out while the goings good, so that is what I'm doing. In the next few months I'll be busy with assisting the transition of the ongoing business to the new owner/operator but after that . . . well, there should be a bit more activity to be seen on the art front. The relief I feel at this is surprising, I'll be poor but able to take up opportunities that with a regular job would be impossible, interesting times indeed.

Anyway, in spite of that I have been doing more art than just farting around with sketching and my new pens, here's a couple of painting commissions I've completed in the last month or so:

Duke, soft pastels on 30 X 40cm yellow pastelmat.






Ruby, soft pastels on 35 X 50cm grey pastelmat.

Inktense, Neocolour II and oil pastels

Still tinkering with watersoluble colours, Inktense pencils and Neocolour crayons. Struggling a bit with these mediums, I'm too used to the flexability of soft pastels, by comparison these are slow and limiting, you can't be as slapdash as you can with pastels as they don't layer, encroach on a highlight and it's terminal, no matter what you do you've lost that highlight. Still, nothing wrong with a bit of discipline for once.

I decided to have a serious bash at a portrait with these. A3 cartridge paper.






Quite pleased with how the eyes and skin worked, not at all happy with the hair (always difficult anyway I find) or the contrast. Being the impatient sort I then pretty much destroyed it with oil pastels (another medium I've done very little with).



An....interesting effect, can't say I'm convinced of it's application for portraits but interesting none the less. There's a very strong holographic effect from the areas of oil pastel that contrasts oddly with the areas done with inktense and neocolour. This could be useful in more abstract, loose applications. I'm not done with this stuff yet I reckon.

Charcoal drawings

Been doing a bit of work in charcoal recently. I find charcoal is a very rewarding medium, you can't mess about with it, got to keep very much in control but I love working with it, much more interesting than bloody graphite. I use stick charoal and charcoal pencils for any fine detail.

Little boy:

Little Girl:

 Blasted tree (3):

Gnarled roots:

Christmas commission challenge....

Now that Christmas is out of that way I can post about the three 'Christmas present' commissions I had this year. What made these interesting was the increasing difficulty and decreasing notice of the three. For the first I had a couple of months notice, nice, straightforward child portrait. No problem at all. A single, lovely reference photo that just about jumped off the screen and plenty of time. The next was a double portrait of two collies in late November, multible reference photos and a bit of compositional jiggling needed....Still no problem, a harder subject but a few weeks was still enough time to get the job done.

In mid December came the real test though, a big landscape commission (I find landscapes to be the toughest subject)...and I only had a matter of days...a very few days...to get it completed. It was a sunset view of a local range of hills called Rincon Ridge, fortunately they are right here in Fox Bay so I dashed out to get some references for the hills and foreground, a quick sort through my sky ref photos for a suitable sunset sky and a bit of photoshopping produced a workable composition so there I was, ready to go but it had to be finished, sent to towm to get framed and be back here before the big day. Really wasn't sure if I could achieve it.

But I did, Jane in the Pink Shop pulled out the stops to get it framed and sent back in time.
:-)

So here are my three Christmas commissions in order of increasing difficulty and tightening deadlines:

Ashleigh, soft pastels on 30 X 40cm yellow pastelmat.

Marni & Zia, hard pastels and pastel pencils on 30 X 40cm grey pastelmat. (really enjoyed doing this one)

Rincon Ridge, Soft pastels, hard pastels and pastel pencils on 50 X 70cm grey pastelmat. (This was tough but in the end rewarding, I didn't get stuck and it turned out better than I dared hope).

I learnt a lot from doing this painting, if I'm being honest with myself I was afraid of attempting large landscapes, the few I'd done felt like flukes. In finishing this commission I've managed to lay some of that fear to rest, I'm now quite looking forward to the next one (which BTW is already in the pipeline...and involves painting buildings as well as natural features....ulp!)

Walk on the wierd side.

Every now an then I have a go at painting or drawing something wierd, a nut doctor would probably love these...

Charcoal on A4 cartridge paper:

Pastels on brown card, 35 X 50 cm.

Finished experiment.

It was interesting doing this. I think it's finished...anyway it was just an experiment. Lessons learnt?...possibly not to do everything with directional strokes, some of the fine detail was hard to achieve, particularly with the hair...maybe I should shave my head...

Definitely going to explore this idea further, possibly using more complex shapes that compliment the primary image more...or contrast it more, could be very interesting.

Experimental self portrait.

Self portrait on 30 X 40 yellow pastelmat. Decided to try out an idea I've been toying with to use the direction of pastel strokes to suggest other shapes than depicted by colour tone and value, as this is the first time I've kept it simple, just concentric circles centred on my right eye.

I ususlly use the pastel strokes as quite a strong element in painting so it's interesting to have that elememt shifed to another dimension...and difficult. We'll see where this goes. Still a lot to do on this.

Ref:

Sketch and start of detail in face:

 Colour filled in:

Double Portrait

Finished my double portrait today. As is so often the case these didn't come out as I expected, I'm reasonably pleased with them though. ( A couple more paintings to show in my exhibition that's coming up in 10 weeks....gulp).

Progress on the double portrait

Tonights progress, more colour built up. I attempted to push these a little warmer but no good, I think these just are going to be cool toned paintings. It still surprises me how little control one has over the look of a painting once you're a into it. One of these days I'm goinf to do a completely crazy painting with no respect for colour tone at all, just using value and nothing else...could be fun.

Double portrait

It's my birthday, today I can do whatever I want....within reason. So bearing that in mind I've made a start on a pair of portraits of my niece. These are based on two photographs taken on the same day, same lighting but showing two different moods. I'm actually painting these at the same time, each time I pick up a new stick of colour I use it on one, then the other before I use another colour. Interesting experiment so far. Both are on 35 X 40 cm grey pastelmat.


Reference photos:

Charcoal undersketch:

  





















Filling colour with soft pastels:

So far so good.

Haven't been here for a while

Cor! Five months since I last posted, where does the time go?

Well for the last seven weeks I've had my arm in a sling after I managed to dislocate my shoulder (it had to be my right arm of course...doh!), happily it's healing well now and I've been (carefully) doing some drawing again. Here's a few pieces I'd got done before my injury:

First of all some commissions, there's a couple more but I'm going to post them individually:

Joey the lab, charcoal & pastels on 30 X 40 cartridge paper.

A set of two individual pastel portraits of a friends children, also one coloured pencil portrait of both together:

......and a couple I did as Christmas presents:

Tealeaf the lurcher, charcoal.

Ruby, my youngest niece, charcoal

Andi

Just got a load of fine new materials courtesy of my sweepstake win, new paper, card, fixative, all sorts, also 3 sets of Unison pastels, landscape 72, portrait 72 and starter 72 so my palette is now pretty decent.

One of the paper types is ingres sheets in a selection of colours, did this this afternoon on A2 black ingres, Portrait of the Singer & Songwriter Andi Neate:

I'm back

Well, my studio is set up (well....it's a spare bedroom that I've taken over), my home made easel works tolerably well so everythings going OK. Here's a couple of pastel pictures on 30 X 40 pastelmat that I've done in the last couple of days.  
In doing these I took a bit of advice from Harley Brown in his book 'Eternal truths for every artist' that made a lot of sense to me "Show the paper who's the boss" meaning just break up the surface with big pastel strokes, no particular form or colour just mess up the surface. I found this gave me a much looser approach than my usual method of working on top of an accurate sketch, good fun.

Angry Johnnyrook, orange pastelmat.

..and Johnny cash....also looking quite angry, grey pastelmat.
Work in progress of this is on the 'on the easel' page

"Destiny has taken a hand"

Charcoal sketch of Bogart in Casablanca:

 
I was inspired to draw this while musing on one of Bogarts lines in this scene "It seems that destiny has taken a hand". This musing was brought about by an incredible stroke of luck, just at a time when I'm wanting to take time away from my regular job to concentrate more on my art and the possibility of getting to a level where I can make some sort of living at it so more materials, the means to make prints, a website and all that stuff is needed. I've been wondering how I can afford this investment when wham! out here there is an annual sweepstake that was drawn last weekend with a top prize of £1500, It had even occured to me that to win that would be a real help, we Falkland Islanders are very keen on the Sweep so there's always a lot of tickets sold but this year I did win the top prize! a lump like that out of the blue is going to be a real help....pure luck of course but just when I needed it most, any other time I would have spent it on a holiday or something or just frittered it away, it's a funny old world.

Ian McKellen

Another sleepless night......still, allows me to get some drawing done. Ian McKellen, charcoal & Soft pastels on white pastel paper. After weeks of using fancy paper like pastelmat and velour it's interesting to go back to such a basic substrate, now that I have decent soft pastels I find this works quite well and it's not nearly as hungry as the more expensive, textured papers.

Paul Verhoeven

Couldn't sleep last night so stuck on one of my favourite old movies, Robocop. In the DVD extras was a photo of the director Paul Verhoeven with his typical bad tempered, tempramental director look. So I had a crack at drawing him, charcoal on A3 pastel block.

Hoped some of tension of the filmmaking could show in this, Robocop was supposed to have been a complete nightmare for all involved. I recall someone on the documentary saying "working on Robocop was like being the victim of a violent crime, you try to blank it out" Grand film though.

Bill Porter

Finished my portrait of Bill Porter, took a while and I found the WIP photos useful so posting this one as a complete work in progress. The finished pastel I'll give to the local social club which Bill chaired for many years.

Charcoal sketch

here's the first stage of the larger painting, graphite sketch on pale grey 30 X 40 pastelmat.

Filled in with charcoal, some colour next.

First blocking in of colour, conte soft pastels.

Bit more done, using my daler rowney pastel pencils on this, excellent pastel cores in them but the wood casings are terrible, grain all over the place so very hard to sharpen without breaking the core.

looking a bit flat, slapped some unison pastel on there, grand stuff.

Getting there.

Finished painting