Knees VII - XIII.

Close ups of each of the little knee pieces.

You can see the layers of oil paint and how rough the edges are. The knees have been simplified by shape and colour. They also have little parts of my fingerprints in them.

Ghost Fox Art.

'Ghost Fox' by rabbitportal (a.k.a Matt Saunders).

He can also be found on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

I received this in the post the other day and it definitely made my day. I recommend that everyone should go and take a little peek, at least, at his work! I bought it for the new house I shall be moving into. I'll be gone in just over a week, ready to start my second year at university. I deserve a treat, right? I may not have achieved much art-related, but I got a job and earned some glorious wonga. I'll find a nice spot for it somewhere. Oh, it makes me smile!

Silence Is Golden.

"Silence is golden."

Here is the second and last drawing I achieved whilst away, I then worked on it again at the weekend with watercolour. I am more pleased with this than the previous one, I suppose the fact I liked the drawing better in the first place also helps and I guess I learnt from what I did to that one as well.

This illustration came about after all the bus journeys filled with noisy children and I assume it included the sleepless times at night too. The moment they left through the doors, it was instant peace. I’ve decided I don’t like kids unless they’re quiet and cute haha!

I reckon I’ll possibly do more pieces like this in my sketchbook, I not sure what sort of drawings as of yet. We shall see, they may not happen like most of the things I want to do, I just hope people like them if I do…

Display Time.

The day before hand in. It was time to put my work up and see how it looked. It was also the chance to work out where the eye line will be around the room, using my height cos I'm short and we have to cater for everyone haha. Then there was the question of how we were going to put them up. I was adamant that I wasn't going to use velcro, because I didn't want it to that stuck to it when I took them down and I didn't want to use pins/nails, because I didn't want holes in my work.

Painting Sand.

Painting the sand valleys. Sounds interesting yes, but probably not as interesting as you may think, I hope I didn’t get your hopes up. Today I finally got round to painting the lines I carved out in my sculptures, these ones names are ‘Red Sand’, ‘Orange Sand’ and ‘Purple Sand’. Original, hey? You will have noticed I am not the best one for naming my art work. These names may not stick, but they’ll do for now. I had a really good, I don’t want it to all end next week. There’s still so much I want to do, but I know it won’t happen. I’m trying not to panic.

I started off the day by acquiring pva, a brush to put it on with and a brush now named ‘Sand Brush’ (it’s for brushing off sand - sculptors need these things haha). It felt good to buy something and not have to worry about if I can afford it or not for once. I mixed up a water/pva solution and gave my sculptures a couple of coatings of it, in the hope that it will stop the sand from crumbling much more (I found at the end that this did not help as much as I wanted it to). Then taking a colour at a time and adding a little pva to it, I painted in the carved lines. I took photos of the stages for each sculpture, you can see these on my Facebook page. It was very enjoyable to do and Clive helped with more options for my work set up to hand in.

I have discovered how nice it is to work without my shoes on in the studio (and no, my feet did not stink). I had to do this because I have blisters on my feet from walking loads in London yesterday. I shall hopefully explain more about that at the weekend. Tomorrow I plan to buy some gold paint. I am so excited about it! As well as that, I shall be working on my plaster sculpture I made on Tuesday, maybe it will be another good day.

Red II.

Acrylic paint on paper, A1.

‘Red II’. These are the pictures that I promised you from the other day, they would have been posted yesterday, however I forgot to take a final photo with my camera. I apologise for the quality of the photos, apart from the first one, because they were taken with my mobile phone camera, due to me being very forgetful (which I’m sure you’ll have guessed by now is a regular occurance) and not realising I would need my camera until I got to uni. Anyway, doesn’t matter now they are up. At the moment this is ‘Red II’, although, as the previous ‘Red’ is in a different style and doesn’t fit in with this set, I may have to think about renaming them. You can read a bit more about this painting in my previous post.

Below are photos of stages to get to the final piece:

Red.

Acrylic paint on paper, A1.

‘Red’. New project! Yeah, so this is the start of my new project, my previous one, I felt, had lost its meaning and there was little point in carrying on with it. For this project I wanted to focus on the colour, mixing of the colour and possibly the brush strokes. At the moment the painting does not need to represent anything, although the sources I used are of the sky with clouds, so you may see that in them. It’s still too early to tell where it will go, but hopefully, it’ll be more successful and enjoyable than the last.

Below are photos of stages to get to the final piece:

First Step.

Acrylic paint on acrylic paper, A3.

This is the first painting I created for the project. It is also a style of mine which first came about in my Painting workshop at college. You may be able to tell that I use a very limited colour palette of red, yellow, blue as well as the mixing of these primary colours into oranges, greens and purples. On the odd occasion within this sort of work I sometimes use black and white. Since the start of University, I have used many different ways of working which I appear to have. Hopefully one day, I will have found my own recognisable look within my art.

Below are photos of stages to get to my final piece: