Long time no post

Been a bit quiet recently so here's some bits and bobs from over the past month or so. I will be making an effort to update more often, gotta kick my lazy ass into gear!

 A bit of character design

Something a bit mythical

 And some environment studies done from photos

Watercolour Demons - Brydges Place Study

It was a wonderfully bright sunny morning today so I decided to sit out the front of my house and have a go at a watercolour study. Now me and watercolours don't generally get along but they are a medium I desperately want to get better at, there's a subtlety about them which just can't be reproduced in any other medium. Computer programs like photoshop or painter aren't even close to being able to do the real thing any justice. Just like a music program trying to replicate the sound of a violin it always sounds flat and synthetic when compared to the real thing. I don't know if we'll ever be able achieve a digital reproduction of either watercolour or violin, they are just so variable and subtle that they can never be reduced to code.

So with all this going through my mind I set about roughly sketching the street with a water soluble pencil, in hindsight yellow was a bad choice but at the time I thought it would help accent the feeling of early morning sunshine. Now I'm not very good at planning a study and sketching the scene was about as far as I got with it, unfortunately this doesn't sit too well with watercolours and after putting in my basic shapes I'd already made the lights too dark and not spent enough time finding the highlights and leaving them paper white.

 So I fell back on my standard rescue method...white acrylic. I would of used gouache but I ran out of white some time ago and haven't replaced it as it's a medium I use fairly rarely. Anyway so I started building up the layers and adding the details being careful to keep the distant houses as vague as possible. It took be about 2 hours to get to this stage and then it started to rain. I may return to it if similar conditions come around again but for the most part I'm happy with it as it is. An exercise in exorcising my watercolour demons.

Desk Study - Contact Drawing

Did this study of my desk to practice my contact drawing about a week ago. It was made using 0.05 and 0.3 micron fineliners. I like doing these as a way to improve my accuracy and train my eye to see contours. It's so easy for it to go hideously wrong but I love the feeling when you get it right. There's always a lot of life to it because your constantly having to observe and adjust where your throwing your line. That and you don't have much room for error, I did make a few corrections using tip-ex so I could continue drawing the rest accurately but for the most part this was done spontaneously.

Life Drawing: March - April

 Hi there, have been a it busy recently with various projects so haven't had a chance to post much, to make up for the lack of content here is a shed load of life drawing from March and April - hope you enjoy :)

Sweet Electron Mother, Take Me Home

A little something I put together a couple of days ago. Recently finished the new Iian M Banks novel 'Hydrogen Sonata', which I really enjoyed. I love the way he deals with the subjects of enlightenment, absolution and transcendence. I've been reading his books for a good few years and have always liked his concept of subliming, when a civilization or society becomes so advanced they decide that the matter based universe has nothing left to offer them and exit reality to go exist in a parallel dimension that kind of equates to a state of nirvana or heaven.

So the word sublime had been rattling around in my head for a few days and out of the regular jumble of thoughts that is my mind this idea for and image pops up. To be honest it bears only a slight relevance to the above but I'm pretty sure that's what started the thought process that produced it.

The piece was done in watercolors then scanned into Photoshop and edited. Watercolors are definitely not my favorite medium, I was originally going to do it as a black and white ink drawing but changed my mind at the last minute to a colour image.

I still have the sketch scanned so I may well do an ink version just to see what it would look like, maybe add some block colour in Photoshop afterwards...could look quite nice... *starts rummaging around for his fine liners*

Eddie the One Eyed Mascot

About six months ago when I was still back in Chinnor my veterinary nurse sister brought home a scruffy looking mutt who had been found wandering a local council estate with one of his eyes hanging out. This was not at all as surprising as you might think, my sister regularly brought her work home with her in the form of hedgehogs, ducks, squirrels and various other poorly creatures.


Originally this dog was only meant to stay until he could be re-homed but we soon became used to having him around, even my dad - who usually refuses to get emotionally attached to animals - saw something in this injured pup he couldn't help but love. Names started being thrown around from the macabre 'Popeye' to the insufferably cute 'Alfie'. After much discussion my suggestion of 'Eddie' seemed to have gained the most popularity and after a brief family conference it was decided. Eddie the one eyed dog was now a member of our family.

Now if I were to have chosen a breed of dog to join our family I would of insisted on something hardworking and noble like a Collie or Black Labrador, definitely not a rat on-a stick Pug/Terrier cross that smells of carpets. Alas though this is not how things with my family, servants of Karma that we are it was fated that our new dog would come to us and come to us he did.

Against all my prior history of dog preference I have come to thoroughly adore Eddie and although he smells terrible he is both quiet and affectionate. His lone eye  and smushed up face give him one of the most comically sad expressions I have ever seen on the face of a canine.

Look at that punnum :)

Needless to say ever since we met I have had to resist the urge to buy him an eye-patch. Fortunately art has given me the option of envisioning this without putting him through the shame and here is the result - Eddie the One Eyed Dog (With Eye-patch) my new mascot and personal hero :)

Sitting on my Bute

The sun was out yesterday so me and my mate Bernie decided to go down to Bute Park in Cardiff for a spot of plein air painting. We walked around for a bit until we found a nice spot where the sunshine was hitting a group of trees on the edge of the playing field and set up our equipment. Bernie looked most professional with his portable easel, I on the other hand was testing my newest invention - a cushion in a plastic bag (if it's your girlfriends nice cushions make sure you do this!) It may not be the most elegant of solutions but it works!

This being the UK the weather changed within minutes of setting down. The sun hid behind the clouds and a bitter wind picked up. Within minutes this pleasant outing had turned into an endurance contest. With the intermittent sunshine the lighting on our subject was constantly changing making the work at hand even more of a challenge. Never the less we persevered until we could no longer feel our fingers. As we left we thumbed our noses at the elements and retired to the warmth of our respective homes.

Despite the weather I was quite pleased with the results of the outing, in situ landscape painting is something I find incredibly rewarding, every time I learn something new. It's amazing what you can learn about the world if you just look at it long enough.

 

I prefer to work with acrylics in these situations, it dries faster so you don't have to carry wet oil paintings around and requires less planning than watercolours. I started the piece by blocking in the grass foreground with a mixture of yellow ochre, windsor blue, titanium white and a touch of cad yellow then worked in the sky with ultrmarine blue toned down with white.

 The clouds were formed with the same mix as the sky just greyed with burnt sienna and more white. I then started putting in the tree shapes using varying mixes of burnt sienna, windsor & ultramarine blue, yellow ochre and cad yellow - toned accordingly using titanium white and black to match the atmospheric perspective. The rest was just a case of filling in the lighting using a very high tint of yellow ochre for the highlights and an almost black green/blue for the shadows.

When I got home I worked into the piece for an hour or so from memory. I picked out a few details and generally just upped the contrast and defined the forms of the trees a bit better.

Bute Park, Cardiff - Acrylic on 230gsm Watercolour Paper 10.5"x7.5" R.G. Montgomery 14/03/13