My first exhibition (sort of)...

As I mentioned in my previous post, I've submitted three paintings to the annual Surrey Learners' Exhibition.  This is for all the students on any of the county's adult education art classes and is held at the Harvey Gallery, which is attached to the adult education centre that I go to in Guildford.

The exhibition runs until next Friday, 5 July 2013, is free to enter and if you're about, then you could do worse than pop in and have a look.

Wednesday evening this week was the private showing for all the submitters, so TLH and I nipped along.  I've never been to a private showing before and didn't quite know what to expect - I was hoping we weren't going to be the only people there but it was packed!  I think the freebie glasses of wine are always a good incentive to get people through the door (that's the cynic in me talking) but I wanted to see what my pictures looked like when hung properly.

And here they are:

They look alright, don't they?  What did surprise me, though, was actually how small they looked when hung with other pictures.  When I'm painting them, they seem fairly big to me - the paper I use is A4 sized, as is the frame - but now I might have to reconsider.  I dunno though.  The size they are is very portable, and guaranteed not to take up too much space; more appealing to a potential purchaser if wallspace is a consideration.  I've put a sale price of £50 each on them but I'm not expecting to sell any of them.

I took a few more photos of other pieces that caught my eye:

In October the Cranleigh Art and Crafts Society will be holding one of their twice-yearly exhibitions so I shall submit all the flower paintings I have for that, I think.

In the meantime, I've just finished yet another one.  This time it's a flower that is native to southern California called a Shortspur Seablush:

I think that makes about 7 or 8 flower paintings now!

Still, I'm doing a beetle next.  A big beetle.  An A2 sized on yer actual proper canvas beetle, no less.

Ring out Solstice bells!

Happy middle-of-2013, everyone!

It's not very summery here in the UK, is it?  We've had a couple of very warm days this week down here in the South, but I had the heating on only last week.  I read a rather depressing news report a couple of days ago that says the crappy summers and freezing winters we're currently suffering are due to several things, including the Atlantic getting warmer and changes in the Sun's ultraviolet output, the upshot of which is that we're likely to continue having this weather for possibly as long as a decade.  *sigh*.  There's no use complaining about it because there's bugger-all we can do about it, except make sure we're wearing the right kind of clothes for the conditions.

But a few warm days in July and August would be most welcome, Weather Gods.

So, how have things been with you since I last darkened this little corner of the internet?  I'm doing pretty well, thanks for asking.

I've been doing quite a fair bit of running lately, actually.  See, way back in January I set myself the goal this year to run a total of 250 miles.  If you recall, last year I achieved the 100 mile goal I set myself, in fact, got there with a couple of days to spare before the end of 2012, so I decided to push myself a bit harder this year and go for 250.  Then promptly spent a great deal of February and March doing no running at all because of problems with my feet, very nasty colds/flu, and terrible, snowy weather!

I've really had to go for it to make up the shortfall.  Well, *drumroll* I can announce that on Monday this week I passed the 100 mile mark!  That's a whole 6 months quicker than I did it last year!  Weirdly, my speed has barely improved over the entire 2+ years I've now been running, but I'm going much further - I completed my first 10-mile outing recently, although I won't be doing that distance as a matter of course; it took me far too long and nearly crippled me!  But I'm trying to get out 3 times a week and so far I've done 4.3 miles on Monday and 4.5 miles yesterday.  Not sure how far I'll go tomorrow, depends on a lot of things - how much energy I think I've got, what the weather's like, that sort of thing.  There is a great deal of walking involved with my so-called 'running' but at least I'm getting out there and exercising.

Which, combined with the 5:2 Fast Diet, is paying off, weight-wise.  I'm currently 12lbs lighter than I was in February and having to give serious consideration to buying some new, smaller sized knickers as my current ones keep slipping down!  Also new bras need looking at - hooray!

The Lovely Husband is doing the running and fasting as well, and he's benefited enormously.  It turns out that he's a far more natural runner than I, and is now running almost twice as fast as I do, and going for much further distances.  He's enjoying it too, which helps.  He ran his first half-marathon distance the other week, and this past weekend saw him cover 15 miles in one go!  He's also shed almost 40lbs in weight since mid-March which is, frankly, a bit quick really but he was carrying a fair bit of timber and something needed to be done.

So that's the health side of things.  As for the art, I seem to be having a bit of a hiatus at the moment.  I've not painted anything (outside of art class) since the Jewel Beetle of the last post.  It'll come back, of that I'm sure.  I'm just having a bit of a break for the moment.

However, I have submitted three paintings to the annual student learners' summer exhibition at the centre where I have my art classes.  Three of my flower paintings have gone in:

Salvia


White Star Flower


Pink Cosmos


I've framed them in white box frames and have put the price at £50 each, which I don't think is unreasonable.  The exhibition runs from 25 June to 5 July and is at the Harvey Gallery, Sydenham Road, Guildford.  If you happen to find yourself in the vicinity, pop along and have a look!  The private view for participants is on Wednesday 26 June and I'm hoping to go along, so will take some photos if I do to share with you all.

And TLH and I are hoping to visit this year's Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in a couple of weekends' time, so watch this space for ninja photo action!!

Jewel Beetle

I've always been fascinated by the amazing variety of insect life on this planet, and the amazing colours that some of them are.

Beetles are no exception.  Some are absolutely exquisitely beautiful and gorgeously colourful, often iridescent and metallic and SHINY!

So I've decided to start doing a series of beetle paintings, starting with Jewel Beetles.  If you've never heard of Jewel Beetles, I'd advise that you go and Google them right now.  I'll wait....

Beautiful, aren't they?  And they come in such a variety of colours.  I went searching on Flickr and came across the most brilliant set of photographs by a Hungarian photographer called Nikola Rahme, who specialises in beetles - I now have access to all the beetle photographs I could possibly want!

I chose the first one - a female Jewel Beetle called Eurythyrea Austriaca - and completed an A5 acrylic of it over a couple of days.  It was interesting to do something more like a zoology textbook illustration rather than something a bit more impressionistic (although mine did turn out that way) and it was bloody fiddly.  Especially the legs.

I'm pretty pleased with how it came out and have now bought myself some metallic acrylic paints to see what the next one will come out like!

Original photo:


My painting:

My littlest niece

My brother takes brilliant photographs, and I've used his photos as inspiration for paintings and drawings several times.

He recently took some lovely black and white, high contrast photos of his littlest daughter, 3-year old Lyra, and I decided that one of them would make a really nice pencil portrait and I hoped I'd make a decent fist of it.  It would be tricky because (a) people are hard to draw; (b) getting a likeness to the actual person being represented is screamingly hard; (c) babies and small children are tricky - their faces are not finished forming yet and, if you're not careful, come out a bit, well, 'blobby'; and (d) smiling people are practically a no-no for portrait artists - portraying a convincing smile is one of the most difficult things.  That's why the Mona Lisa is barely smirking.

The photo I chose of Lyra has all of these problems.  I was really going to have to push myself to get this one to come out right. (small hint - obviously it did otherwise I wouldn't be showing you!!)

For this one I did do a series of photos showing progress, on the off chance that it worked out okay!

I printed off two copies of the photo I wanted to use, one bigger than the other, so I could get the detail right.  This one was done in pencil on A4 acrylic paper.  I started off taping it up, as usual, then began drawing in the basic facial details and trying to get proportions right.  The eraser got used a lot.



Then I started adding more details:



And moved the photos around the board so I could see them better.  In this one I've added the background just by smudging the pencil with my fingertips:



Worked more on the eyes, and the neck, and started working on the hair:



Coming together now, am pleased with progress:



Sometimes viewing from an angle is interesting:



Final version:



I'm extremely proud of this one - I think it's the best picture I've done so far, by a long way.  It gives me hope that I might just be able to draw recognisable people after all - with more practice of course!!

Portrait of my brother

After the snowy trees, I decided I wanted to have another go at painting a portrait.  People are hard to draw and getting a likeness is fiendishly difficult but it can be achieved with practice.

I had in mind a close-up profile photo of my brother taken by his wife on holiday, which I particularly liked.

I decided I would use A5 canvas board again, and started to sketch him out on the board.

As the likeness grew, and I was enjoying the way the graphite was moving around on the canvas board (you can smudge it very easily with your fingers to get shadows and texture), then I made a decision to keep it as a pencil portrait and not to paint over it with acrylic.  Because while it was coming along in pencil, and actually starting to look like my brother, chances are plastering over it with acrylic would ruin it and he'd end up looking like something from a freak show!

So it has remained a pencil drawing, started and finished on 20 May 2013,  and a not too bad one to boot:



And the success of doing this one led me to do the next one...

Winter Trees

The winter of 2009 was a very snowy one and the week before Christmas, it was decided that TLH and I would drive to his native homeland to fetch his parents and bring them back so they could celebrate with us and his sister.

The journey, on a good day in summer, takes between 2.5 and 3 hours each way.  This journey, on 21 December 2009, was a couple of days after heavy snowfall and media reports of cars being abandoned on the approach roads to Basingstoke and, indeed, as we approached one of the big roundabouts outside Basingstoke, the Sky News reporter and satellite van were still there, and abandoned cars lined both sides of the hard shoulder.

We didn't have too much trouble with the roads but it did take us over 7 hours to get to his parents, mostly due to one of the Severn Bridges being closed due to sheet ice falling from the cables, and subsequent enormous traffic jams trying to get over the open one, so we had to go the long way round.

It was a very long journey.  But the upshot was the weather.  It had stopped snowing but it got very foggy in Hampshire and Berkshire (we go across country to get to the M4).  It was incredibly atmospheric, so I spent a great deal of my time taking photos on my iPhone out the window as we were zooming past the scenery.  I remembered I'd got some surprisingly good photos, considering I was in a moving vehicle travelling at about 50mph+ when they were taken, and I decided one of these might be a good subject for my next painting:

See what I mean?  It ended up being a toss-up between this last one, the one with the broken fence and the sun and the one I finally chose:

I love the colours in this photo - the slight green and pink tinge to it all, and the yellow where the sun presumably is.  And the two trees, just standing there.

For some reason I didn't take photos of the process of painting this one but you can be guaranteed it involved scumble glazing with my stencil brushes!  I used an A5 sized canvas board for this one and, if I remember, this was a quick painting, only taking a few hours to do, and it came out really well:



And a close up:



I've now put this in a matt silver frame and it looks great!  I may well go back and do some other paintings from this photo series...

Bluebell Painting

Time for a catch up again.

My last flower painting is one of bluebells, that I started on 8 May so getting on for a month or so ago.

I found a photo on Flickr that I really liked and thought I'd have a go at painting it, especially as it's bluebell season round here just now.  I mean, have a look at these photos I took while running through a bluebell wood just the other day - I had no idea they were there and they sort of ambushed me as I ran round a corner; I just HAD to stop and take some photos!





So, as usual, I taped a piece of A4 sized acrylic paper to the board on my easel, masking-taped off the margins and attached the photo I was to copy above it:



I then decided on a shade of light green to cover the whole surface:



Then, using my trusty stencil brushes, started scumble glazing in the background colours.  I then drew out the shape of the focal point flowers, and painted them in white:



I added more background colours, more blues and pinks, and started painting pale green on the stalk:



Then started working on the flowers themselves:



Until I was happy with them:





Added light and shading, including on the stalk:



And here's the finished painting, with the masking tape removed and edges tidied, taken on 12 May:



I decided I needed a bit of a break from painting flowers for the moment, so looked for something else to paint instead, finally deciding on a photo I took during the snowy winter of, I think, 2009, which I'll show you in my next posting.