Tangerine Acrylic in Moleskine Sketchbook!

Not the most imaginative post title but it's nothing if not specific! No, the reason is that this is a very hastily written post as Alexander is being taken out for a walk at the moment by our lovely volunteer helper and he is due back any minute. I get 2 hours help a week and I have spent most of it cleaning. I'm not that much into cleaning but a basic standard of hygiene must be kept at least! Especially given the amount of food Alex hurls at the floor during mealtimes! Plus there is Loxie's obstreperous malted fur to be eradicated.

Anyway, a week or so ago I was brave and finally got the acrylics out, regardless of whether or not I would have time to do a painting with them from start to finish. I thought it best to paint while Alexander was awake as sleeptime is just too uncertain. After the success of the banana watercolour painting I thought painting at breakfast again would be a good bet. He has a pretty good level of patience to sit in his highchair, eat fruit and muffins and watch me paint.

And here is the 'fruit' of my labour (I guess that could also be a title applied to Alexander!). It is a tangerine, painted in acrylics into my A6 Moleskine sketchbook - amazing what this little Moleskine can have applied to its pages.  I really have been thinking a lot about a holiday to a Spanish island and so this little tangerine with the sunlight (or as much of the sunlight as makes it in through my kitchen window in March) seemed to be a little dream of warmer climes. I think the buff titanium and olivey green background feel pretty reminiscent of continental summers.

Unfortunately there are a few bits of it that I've messed up. The tones on the shaded side of the tangerine are a bit clunky and the stalks are too. I had actually got it looking how I wanted it and then decided I would just add a little more at which point Alexander squeaked that his patience was running out and I just blobbed a load of paint on without checking that I'd managed to mix the colour up to match what I'd already been using. Oh well. There is always something. A painting is never really finished. I'm sure no artist is ever 100% happy with the result.The black lines are because I was painting over a scribbled on page in the Moleskine and didn't manage to cover them quite.

Equipment: Acrylic paint, Moleskine, Bright brushes.

Top Banana, Alexander!

I had that feeling, the one where you absolutely, really, totally HAVE to paint! I wanted to paint in acrylics. In my head I paint in acrylics a lot. It's been going on a while now, ever since I painted The Blue Man, which was May 2013, the last time I actually painted in acrylics! I paint all sorts of things, in my head, flowers, portraits, abstract bird filled plains. I paint with brushes, I paint with a palette knife, in lots of lovely colour combinations. Then Alexander wakes up after being asleep for about 10 minutes and I think, just as well I haven't just mixed up those lovely colours or they'd all be about to dry out/get pawed by Loxie now! Yesterday morning though, Alexander had been asleep for 5 minutes and I couldn't resist any longer and decided I'm going to take a chance on starting a painting and who knows maybe I will get to finish it. I'll just do it in the Moleskine, just do a little sketch, small enough that I can paint it quickly before Alexander wakes up. I ran to the kitchen pencil and Moleskine in hand and sketched the three bananas on the table. Then he woke up!

But, today I finished it...in...watercolour, but hey, at least it wasn't Promarkers, I did get the enjoyment of using a brush! And I think it turned out pretty nice. I actually painted it while we were eating our breakfast and Alexander and I chatted away while I was painting. Maybe I underestimated this kid's patience after all?

I must confess that banana number 3 wasn't painted from observation because, on realising that we were out of bread and pancake equipment because I failed to go shopping yesterday, I fed it to Alexander. He ate my still life while I painted the memory of it. Anyway, here they are, bananas, one of which is in baby Alexander's tummy.

Equipment: WATERCOLOUR! (and pencil) on Moleskine Sketchbook

Every Day In May: Days 24, 25, 26, 27

I haven't been sketching as regularly since May 23rd, my last post. On Friday 24th I had some pain and the midwife at the hospital told me I need to be taking it easier - I had been trying to clear some of the rubbish my neighbour has left in my garden. So I went to my Mum's for a few days and completely lost track of my EDiMs!  I have managed to do a few of the remaining items from the EDiM list now that I am back in Bristol but I'm also finding that drawing is aggravating the pain in my right shoulder blade so I can't do more than one drawing a day.  To add to that, Domino was run over today and is at the vets on a drip tonight, poor little boy, it's one thing after another with him. Hes certainly using up his 9 lives early in life!

So I basically have just picked one a day at random, the ones that took my fancy the most as I knew I wouldn't be able to do them all before May 31st. I have also done a couple of sketches for recipes which are just in pencil and need painting but I will do that at a later date and post them separately as they aren't EDiMs.  Here are the EDiMs I chose:

#24 'Something That Makes You Laugh'
The baby moves all the time, he is so active. But the other day I could see a little foot (I think) moving across me from side to side. It looked like I had a little mouse trapped under my skin!
Equipment: The trusty cheapo HB retractable pencil.

#25 'Tote Bag'
All my bags are packed for hospital and everything in the house is ready...but now I'M not ready. I'm too tired to have a baby at the moment! I've been waking up thinking 'no I don't have the energy for labour today!'
Equipment: Pen and watercolour

#26 'A Screw'
This was so poignant to my pregnancy! I have so many random screws in my kitchen drawer left over from all the IKEA furniture I've been building over the past few months - a chest of drawers, a bed, a coffee table, a sofa and a wardrobe. Seriously, this baby is going to think he's been born in an IKEA showroom!

I was struggling a bit with drawing this as my 'S' pen wasn't working properly and my back was really sore from trying to do the line work. But then I sat outside in the sunshine and had a brainwave over how to colour it inspired by a bit of mesh I pulled apart as I opened a punnet of nectarines. I was actually going to just use the mesh as a stencil and pull it off after painting but the paint made it kind of stick and so I dug out an old bottle of Diamond Glaze to stick it on properly as I liked the industrial sort of effect it gave it. I really loved doing this!
Equipment: Pitt Pens 'S' 'F' and 'M' (Basically because the S has gone scratchy for some reason)! Acrylic paint in Primary Blue with a bit of Titanium White and Buff Titanium mixed in, The red net from a punnet of nectarines, Judi-kins Diamond Glaze.

#27 'Something Sticky'
I chose this one because it was so cold the other day, for May, that I made a cup of cocoa in the middle of the afternoon! Cocoa on a May afternoon, I ask you! However, as usual I overestimated the amount of time I needed to heat it for and it all bubbled over. Oh well, at least it has forced me to finally clean the microwave!
Equipment: Triplus Fine Liners. I used the fine liners as I knew they aren't waterproof and thought that drawing on the chocolate and then getting the pen wet would reflect the fact that I had made such a mess of making the cocoa!!

I've really enjoyed this EDiM challenge and it has helped me to create a little book of sketches to document the end of my pregnancy.  It has also helped to have been posting into a Facebook group as it is so nice to get comments and to see how other people interpret the daily themes.
I am considering embarking on something for June, the 30 Days of Creativity calender but not sure. I will decide when I wake up on the 1st of June...tomorrow!

Portraiture - The fifth and final class

I decided to have another stab at acrylics today in portraiture class.  I liked what I produced last week but as this was my final class - really final as I won't be able to sign up for any more art classes for a very long time - I wanted to try and really achieve the type of portrait I've been hoping to get to!

When the model, Chris sat down the teacher noted that he sat with a tilt.  I looked at him and said to the class that I thought the way he sat tilted made him look like a politician - something about his face also made him look like one. So something I really like about how this portrait turned out is that I do think it looks like a portrait of a politician. Not that he is one in fact. If you could see the whole A3 page it is even more evident I think. I left the background unpainted and I think it looks like he has been cut out to be put on a placard or billboard.

Unlike last week, I decided not to mix the colours on the palette. I put a load of Primary Blue acrylic on the palette and basically put down all the areas of the model that were in shadow, regardless of how much shadow they were in. Then I completely washed the brush and put down pure Titanium White on all the areas where I could see the light was directly hitting him. I wanted to take a photo at this stage so I could put it on the blog and also because I actually thought it looked pretty good at that stage - I was almost tempted to just call it as finished there and then! That part only took about 10 minutes.  But I couldn't get to my bag to get my camera as my bump was too big to squeeze betweem the easels and I had a vision of sending them all flying like a row of dominoes.

After that, I worked on putting some of his features in. I didn't want to mix the blue and white on the palette because when I tried it it produced a kind of third colour and when I tried that out on his face it looked flat and lifeless. What I wanted was streaks of the blue and white which merged on the canvas. I'm really pleased with how this turned out, which is a relief as it would have been really frustrating to walk away from my final opportunity to attend a portraiture class feeling like I hadn't managed to produce what I'd been hoping to from signing up for the course.

I'm going to miss this class though. It has been a lot of fun, the other students were really nice, and I'll miss the teacher's comments which have included lines like 'you've made his eyebrows look like an untrimmed hedge', 'you need to give her more brain' 'that's really good! Oh no, actually it's not.'  He's so funny.

I also took a photo of the model this week. It is at a slightly different angle as I stood up to take it but I thought it was about time I had a photo of a model so I can make a comparison!

Here also is my homework practise I did for a pair of eyes in profile:

Every Day In May: Day 20/21 - 'Favourite Drink/Last thing I bought'

My favourite drink at the moment is fizzy water but I drew that for #1 Bubbly. So here is something else I love Pina Colada Snowcones or it could equally be a frozen Pina Colada. Couldn't draw this from observation as we don't have them in Bristol, UK. So I imagined it from memory in this fabulous flamingo glass I bought in IKEA at the weekend. It was only 75p!!!  I did the initial sketch in pencil on Monday and then painted it today. And it took me pretty much all afternoon to paint!!! I wanted to use acrylics as I thought that the texture of the snowcone would be better achieved with the fluffiness of acrylic. But of course I was using my A6 sketchbook, and only one page of it as opposed to the double page sketches I often do. So even with using a very fine brush it was a fiddly process to paint, especially around the lettering and the straw!!

Every Day in May: Day 19 - 'Left Hand'...and Warning...this is the post where I talk about my life...

The prompt was to draw the palm of your left hand but as I had actually got around to doing something with my nails on Saturday, and as I have got a thing about this cheap (£1.50 from Primark) neon ring I bought recently, I did a double page with the palm and the back.

I drew in pencil as all the nail buffing and hand cream had put my hands in a more delicate (in a good way) state. If I'd just been cleaning the house and put them in a more weathered state I probably would have drawn in pen. I coloured the nails with nail varnish (Rimmel) and for the ring I coloured in with a neon yellow nail varnish - which I rarely wear because it might be a great colour but the varnish itself is abysmal! Doesn't go on well, doesn't self-level and chips really quickly. It's from American Apparel. I don't recommend it! Again, the scanner won't pick up the neon which is a shame because I think the neon gives this a really graphic look and makes it obvious why I didn't colour the hands.

There was originally no pink around the background of this, it was just plain sketchbook background. But then I had a bit of a mixed day yesterday which unfortunately came out in my sketchbook. It was actually a really productive day but also, I overheard my neighbour say something about me which really upset me. I won't go on about it here, but in the evening when I was trying to finish this drawing I ended up making a note of what had happened during the day, as I sometimes do in this sketchbook. I really don't want there to be negativity in the sketchbook, like I don't want it in my life because I don't want it to be around the baby. But it has been really evident that during my pregnancy, certain people from different camps have, to be blunt, taken the piss a bit. Basically I see it as that they've used my positivity and the result of the hard work I've done to deal with my situation as an excuse to treat me in a way that I would never dream of treating a pregnant woman, let alone one who is going through a pregnancy alone. Letting me down, piling their own problems on me and not even asking me how I am, expecting me to be able to continue to physically and emotionally deal with things in the same way as I would have done when I was not pregnant and was working full time. The result for my sketchbook was that I guess while I was doing this page something in me thought that maybe an important part of my pregnancy sketchbook was to at some point spell it out more clearly that it's not all roses.

However, I guess pregnancy does bring about emotional waverings and when I woke up this morning I decided 'no', I'm not prepared to have that in my sketchbook. Because people who can't see that a pregnant woman who's been left by her partner should perhaps be cut a bit of slack are just a pitiful bunch. There are other people in my life who have the same level on knowledge about what I've been going through who have been really supportive. They didn't need it spelling out. They didn't need me to be one of those people who cries out 'woe is me', never has a smile on my face, and talks endlessly about their situation in order to have an inkling that as well as all the happiness and excitement of looking forward to having the baby, and alongside all the art classes and sketching, thre is no husband sitting next to me on the sofa to share it all with. When I'm exhausted and it makes my legs and my tummy ache to stand up and walk even a few yards and there's no milk or fruit in the fridge, there's no father of the baby there to jump in the car and pop out to Tesco to get it.  A friend of mine, who is also going to the baby's Godfather, sent me an email a couple of weeks ago. In it he spoke about being Godfather and told me some news about what he was up to etc. And there was also this line where he said 'I know it's not easy for you'. It meant so much to me. Because that's all it takes. And remembering that is the reason why I now have a lovely pretty pink background around this sketch of the hand in my background, which I really really enjoyed painting.

It's strange for me to write this stuff but, as per the usual format, it's the story behind the painting so that's why it is here.

Oh, and here is the painting!

Portraiture Class 4

In a bid to force myself to not wimp out on painting in portraiture class today, I only took acrylics and cardboard with me to the class, no sketchbook!  This was my first ever attempt to paint a portrait and only the third time I've ever stuck a paintbrush into acrylic. I was pretty daunted!

To begin with I thought this was heading for disaster. I put some paint on the board and just basically had a load of featureless blobs. It looked like a 5 year old's picture. In the first few minutes of the class I had a vision of me ending up at the end with something that didn't even look human! But in the end it has turned out pretty okay for a first attempt I think. Well, its a human.

I painted with a 1/2" flat brush as I had a feeling, based on the type of acrylic portraits I've seen that I like, that broad strokes of paint would suit me more than fiddling around with a little pointy brush. I wanted to do a B&W painting with some of this nice 'Titanium Buff' colour thrown in. I thought I would use it for warm highlights on the face but when I saw that our model for today Natasha had blonde hair and was wearing a light beige scarf, it made a lot of sense to use the buff colour for those elements. Actually, another girl in my class who is also experimenting with acrylics did paint the face mainly in a near identical buff colour although she made hers with a mix of Umber and White.

I do really like the colours I chose. My tutor encouraged me to really be brave with the pure white. I had to reposition her left eye about 25 minutes before the end of the session to avoid falling into my boss-eye trap of last week! I think I could've gone a darker on the right eye. It was very dark to begin with but for reasons even unknown to myself I made it lighter.

An issue I realised I had in the first 10 minutes was that my surface board was too small for working with the flat brush and for the proximity I was to the model. But I really dislike starting again once I've started something, I'd rather just persevere and work with it, so I continued on. I think this turned out to beneficial as it meant I couldn't do my usual wasting time on the model's clothes!

Equipment: Cardboard back of an A4 sketchbook (my 'canvas'), Daler Rowney acrylics in Titanium White, Black and Buff Titanium. 1/2" flat brush (no idea what it is made of). I also used a smaller flat brush for the lips and a very small pointed brush for the eyes. I borrowed those from the tutor so no idea what they were.

Every Day in May: Day 2 - 'Sound' (and first ever attempt at painting with acrylics)

I misread the theme for Day 2 as 'Draw a favourite smell'. I was very excited about this as I knew exactly what to draw and it would fit in perfectly with my sketchbook being a pregnancy journal as I have been obsessed with the smell of a hammer in my kitchen draw! On re-inspection later I realised it was a favourite 'sound'. I was pretty stuck with this as the things that are my favourite sounds are things like the sound of the baby's hearbeat, Loxie chirruping, rain on the window i.e. all things I've drawn very recently. But then as I was sitting in the garden underneath the very blossomy tree that was covered in more bees than I've even seen, I realised how much I was enjoying the combination of the sound of the buzzy bees and the sound of the city. I know a lot of people dislike the sound of the city but I really love the hum of traffic, sirens, aeroplanes overhead etc. So I decided to just draw what I could see from where I was sitting...

'The Sound of Summer'

The added bonus of putting this composition to paper was that I knew I was going to have to draw a lot of white for all the blossom and this has forced me to finally crack open the acrylics. I drew in pencil and then painted bits of the drawing. I didn't want to paint the whole thing. I also thought there was a strong possibility I might really mess this one up so used the final page in my Moleskine - the one I had covered in brown paper. As it turns out, I'm now kicking myself that I didn't just use the next page in the new Seawhite sketchbook. My line of thinking with this 31 days of drawing is that it will have lots of pregnancy memories in it and I will be able to give it to the baby when he is older. A painting of our garden would have been a really nice thing to have in it!

I'm annoyed with the scanner again as it has scanned this so fuzzy that it has obliterated the bees! What am I doing wrong, I don't know. Also, the wall in the garden is white but I didn't paint it because I wasn't sure how it would look against the blossom and the walls of the houses. But now that I look at it again, I think I really should've gone ahead and painted it white.

 I feel pretty inspired to take these acrylics along to portraiture class next week now (and to actually use them). I now understand what people say about them being fast drying though! Especially as I was painting outdoors!