Eggs

Pastel on paper

A small part of our household goods arrived last week including my pastels, some paints, panels and paper. Great delight to be reunited with them, followed by a more than a little trepidation and procrastination. There is only so much alternative living (where you do the alternative rather than doing what you are supposed to be doing) you can do before you have to bite the bullet and get down to it.

Egg studies - to get my feet wet with colour. The deceptively simple shape of eggs provides complex possibilities for colour, shadows and light, reflections, warm and cool tones.

Shadowy Corners

pastel on paper
I have been in an artistic ditch for a while but hoping that is past now and that I am back into the groove.
This was quite fun to do and I limited myself just to catching the way the light fell and not letting myself get too caught up in the extraneous details outside of the light.
The time off since my last post has given me space to think about artwork in general. Some decisions made about what I am aiming for and my enjoyment in creating which I was in danger of losing.

Bedside

pastel on paper

I have mentioned several times recently my struggle with trees. Admittedly in paint and a desire to make a recognisable painterly tree. Today Jeff Smith posted these really wonderful trees on his blog in pastel.

6 O'clock Shadow

The name is a misnomer - it was two o'clock but I prefer the play on words! We have a covered back balcony (the sides are just wooden bars with netting) and in the afternoon the sun shines through and makes wonderful shadows with the bars. Ever since we arrived here I have wanted to draw it and thought there is no way I would ever be able to work quickly enough to catch the light before the shadows change. Of course there is no way but I took a tip that Mary gave me (I believe she got it from Michael Newberry) to lay in the shadows first. The colour of the light didn't change much but the shadows moved across the floor very quickly. So having worked out where the shadows were it was much easier to then concentrate on the light. Second question was how much of outside detail should I include and I decided that as it was the shadows on the floor and side net wall that interested me most I would just give a suggestion to what was outside. All in all I am pretty pleased with the way this came out. I tweaked it a bit once I got it inside.

New Year's Resoltion 2 - Keep website updated regularly.

Red Thread

oil on canvas, 6" x 6"
The first of my "homework" - I'm sure I'm still not getting the paint on thick enough (that is SO hard for me, I want to scrape off and leave minimal paint on the canvas! I'm using cotton reels as they are nice solid blocks of colour to work with while I learn this new way of painting. It involves starting with a dark wash over the canvas. You then "erase" the paint for the most highlighted areas and then paint into the ground from dark to light. As I see it the image here on the computer I can see that my top ellipse on the gold thread in the background is not right but, in my defence, I was concentrating more on colour than anything else in this exercise. I am very pleased with the muted colour in the front yellow reel and its shadow. This was very definitely a different way of painting and I was aware mid way through that I was not thinking about accuracy of depicting s but was engrossed in colour and light. I'm not quite at the Fauvist point but feel I am heading in the right direction. One of my instructions for these lessons was to paint as if using a palette knife and not to draw with paintbrush. If you want to learn about how this method works I really recommend Michael Newberry's tutorial .

At the end of our road is a police post - I was struck this week that this would be normal in many cities until you think that the policeman has his tent pitched right there on the pavement/sidewalk and in the morning when we head out to work, his laundry is hanging from a line strung between the tent and trees a few feet down! Police and Army both are "housed" in tent villages in what is the "posh" end of town. Among large villas that would be the envy of many western towns are these little encampments, complete with guard posts and little snack shacks. At one of the security posts that we passed today I was surprised to see smoke billowing out from the inside the post and when I looked back I was even more surprised to see that the soldiers had lit a fire INSIDE the post which couldn't have been more than about 4 ft square!