Need to catch up!

*Sigh*

Well, if you've been reading this blog for long enough you'll know updates are a bit erratic due to my terminal laziness, so this lengthy gap is nothing to be worried about.  All is as it ever was at Jones Towers.

But I need to catch up on the art classes postings as I know that one or two of you actually quite enjoyed reading them!

So each course, from start to finish, is one term and is about 10 or 12 classes in length.  I finished the last course (which was on portraiture) with the big portrait painting of The Lovely Husband, then after the summer break I signed up for Kim's next course which is on Still Life.  Lifes.  Lives.  Whatever.  Groups of objects.

First class for this new term was about a month ago, 27 September, so I've 3 or 4 classes to update you and I'll do separate posts about each class.  But first I'll fill you in with what I painted and drew in the summer.

So remember I was painting Winkworth Arboretum and briefly alluded to a painting I was starting of Fennigook Beach? And I decided that I liked the very basic painting of the beach where I'd just blocked in the areas? (I described it to my tutor and she said 'like David Hockney?' and I realised she was right) And I couldn't decide whether to leave the painting like that or carry on?  Well, I decided to do both!

As the painting in the post above was a big one, i.e., 16"x12", I decided to carry on with that one as the fully detailed version, and I painted a much smaller, i.e., 8"x6", Hockney version, and here they both are.  Only the smaller one is currently framed and on the wall:

The bigger version is finished and I'm just deciding what to do with it:

I'm quite pleased with it, although I think the colours may be a bit too bright.  Still, I think the green cliff face has worked very well and it's all good practice.

What else?  Oh yes, during the last course Kim suggested that I might get on with using charcoal as I obviously like using my fingers to smudge soft pencil to create shadow and tone, so I got myself a set of three charcoal pencils in light, medium and dark.  I got the ones that look like a pencil as charcoal is filthydirty to work with and I want to keep the smudging to where I deliberately put it, not where I accidentally touch the paper!

And, yeah, I like it.  I've not used it very much so far as I've been doing the painting, but I did do this sketch of a badger skull that I have (apologies the photo is so dark):

Finally I decided I wanted to have a go at doing a seascape, crashing waves on the shore, that sort of thing.  As I didn't have any suitable photos that I'd taken myself, I headed off to Flickr, the photography storage website.  Needless to say there are several thousand of them on Flickr and I wasn't sure what I was looking for but I've saved half a dozen or so that I really like and might make a bit of a series of them if I get on with them.

So, the first one I've done is based on this photograph, taken in Malta:

I particularly like the sea green colour of the wave and the contrast between it and the almost black sea behind it and dark grey sky; this is my 8"x6"version:

I've used a white mount (although I'm wondering if a very pale grey might not have been better...) and a black frame, and it's currently languishing in the sitting room waiting to find a place to go:

And I'm currently having a go at doing a painting of this particularly ambitious New Zealand seascape, although I might have bitten off more than I can chew with this one:



I decided to do a big painting of this, a 16"x12" version.  I only started it a couple of days ago and have been working on the sky so far, so there's a fair way to go yet and it's only in the very early stages:

It might work, it might not but I'll keep you posted.  And that's where we are with the artwork I've done at home.  As I said, I'll do separate posts about the classes as we've been doing some really interesting stuff in those, such as monoprinting and working with ink (and bleach!) but you'll have to wait for those.  And then there's the crochet I've been doing.....

All for future posts!!