Half a face

Okay, I worked on this using acrylics. I love the forehead, and that may be all that I keep. The eye hasn't got enough feeling in it, and the under-eye area I always struggle with when working in colour.

Painting when wet, 1 of .........

It was snowing, and drizzling, and hail stoning on Easter Monday afternoon. I used the palette knife to scrape on the pinkish background, then, instead of blow-drying it, I painted on the branches wet in wet using quite a stiff brush. It was satisfying the way the paint was scraped away, and built up channels. Then I'd wipe the pink off my brush, and load it with a brown-grey mix, and work that in. I'm going to work over and over this one, so this will be the first photo of I don't know how many.

Nine Block Pyracantha

Here it is. I want to sharpen up the edges of the blocks so I'll paint over the boarders again later with the white gesso. I've painted these from my first charcoal sketches, and I want to make more drawings from life in charcoal, paying attention to the shapes the branches make as they change direction or have been chopped short.

My first drawings remind me of a child's drawings. I made a lot of assumptions.

Now it's like I've had my eyeballs washed clean and can see how they really look.

But, faulty as it is, I'm glad I've gotten this study out of my system. I feel like I can move on, without having skipped over a step.

Plastic Pyracantha

I painted this canvas working from the pencil drawing I'd done earlier. I'd wanted to paint it from life, but I was busy with the children all day and then it got dark.

So, after tea, while the rest of the family watched Blackadder, I sat in the corner of the living room and painted, gently rebutting my four year old daughter's kind offers of assistance.

I worked in acrylics, because my husband has a bad chest and turps fumes aren't nice to him. Anyway, I only tend to paint with oils in the garage, or in the kitchen with the back door open for ventilation. And oil paint, turps and kids aren't a good mix.

The acrylics' drying rate was good and, at the same time, bad. Good, because I could use a hairdryer to dry the under-painting. Bad, because I got mixed results when I worked back over areas I'd only painted 20 minutes earlier. I need to read up to see what I can mix with them to keep them workable for longer.

When I'd finished this painting I immediately started preparatory work on a larger painting based on the nine charcoal studies I'd done. Fortuitously I had a ready-cut piece of board measuring 50cm square, perfect for 3x3 10cm blocks with a 5cm boarder. I painted the boarder in white acrylic gesso in an overlapping grid, which echoes my garden trellis. Now I'm pondering what colour to use as a background for the blocks. I may just use the neutral pink which I used on the long canvas yesterday, or I may use a range of tones. No, I want the Pyracantha branches to be the main feature, and varying the backgrounds will just be an unwanted complication. I'll keep it simple.

Oh, the title of this post comes from the fact that I used acrylic paints which are, after all, plastic.

My tree

It's really starting to bug me, what kind of tree this is. If I remember rightly it's technically a shrub which was planted by the previous owners, and grew tall as there's little light at ground level.

This is an oil board, about A4, which I covered with a thin layer black and red acrylic. When it was dry I squeezed out a load of white acrylic, and smeared it around with a plastic palette knife, then started scraping back to the black to describe the trunk and branches. After a while I added some green, and then some red as a contrast, and mixed all three to make a pale grey/lilac to suggest the floor and the wooden planter.

I hate it as a painting, but I loved it as an exercise. I should really do some more of these to see where they lead.

Drawing on the past

Whilst at college, we were set a project of drawing a cup. First, we did simple sketches, then we increased the scale of our drawings. The final work was to break the cup & work from the shattered pieces (I missed that day, so I kept my cup whole).
The most rewarding task for me was to draw/paint the cup using no line, only colour. I placed the cup on the table and squatted over it with my paper and chalk pastels. After totally immersing myself in the task, I finally stopped and stood back, and was impressed by the outcome. So much so that when I came across the piece years later I framed it and it hangs on my kitchen wall.
More recently, I started working on lino-printing. It was a medium I remembered fondly from my early school days, and wanting to work in a new area I easily persuaded my dad to get me a cutting set for my birthday.
Seeking inspiration I decided to draw from my cup picture. And here are the results.