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

Life Drawing - Charcoal Revisited

Had an interesting life drawing session yesterday at 10 Feet Tall. It was a 'suggest a theme' session where people posted what they would like to see on the FB page and the model did his interpretation of the suggestions. This included wearing a morph suit, pressing and wrapping himself in cling film, posing in a druids robe and then to appease the purists a few standard poses.

I think everybody struggled with the wrapped in cling film pose, it was one of those things that would have been really interesting if you could spend several hours on it, as it was we only had 15/20 mins (I really must remember to put times next to the drawings!) I wasn't too displeased with my attempt, using charcoal helped as i could lay down tone and then pick out highlights.

I've recently come back to charcoal after a long old while, we never really got on but it's something I've always wanted to get better with as you can get such a good atmosphere with the stuff. That and it's fun to get messy sometimes (I imagine it would be quite painful to try with a pencil!) I did a few studies from photo ref before leaving just to get back in the swing of things, I've posted it along with the results of the session which I can bear to show! (hint: it's the female one)

Disaster Recovery

OK so had a bit of a disaster on Thursday when my hard drive failed, lost pretty much everything and me being utterly stupid I hadn't backed up any of my recent work... just disappeared into the ether with little hope of recovery (have you seen the price of data recovery?!) So after briefly weeping for my lost data I set about picking up the pieces. Bought a new hard drive, reinstalled windows and all my programs and got back to work... life goes on.

One piece of recent work I was able to recover was on my girlfriends usb stick from where we'd got it printed. 

So in memory of my fallen hard drive I present ' The Old Gods - Pilgrimage' conceived several years ago after a binge of documentaries about South America this was lying semi finished for about 2 years until I completed it recently. This was the last piece of work to be finished on my old hard drive.

Goodbye old friend, you shall be missed...

Adventures in Acrylic

Having worked digitally almost exclusively for the past 2 years I thought it would be good to get back to my traditional roots. To this end I ushered in the new year with a spree of acrylic paintings. These were given as gifts to various family and friends for their birthdays or long overdue promises (lovely sentiment or cheapskate solution - you decide!) 

I confess I'd forgotten how much I enjoy the tactile joy of working with physical medium, the push and pull of manipulating paint on canvas. This combined with the gut wrenching fear of fucking things up and the surprise of happy accidents has made this an interesting foray back into the wilds of traditional media.

This experience forced my hand into practicing techniques I have read about but are easily worked around in digital painting (painting fog is so much easier in photoshop!) and this is already feeding back into my digital work. I have found a new reverence for those old masters who could use such a fickle, indefinite medium to create works of such subtlety and elegance.

Enough pontificating, in no particular order here's the paintings...

 

Fresh Start

Welcome everybody to my Art Hole!

This is my latest attempt at an art blog where I will be dumping (pun tentatively intended) my artistic misadventures. The last few blogs I started have fallen into grim silence after being starved of input, I will try to not let this happen this time. I am going to do my best to keep this updated at least weekly, more of a personal challenge than anything else!

Here's some life drawing from the past few weeks to kick things off. I go to the weekly sessions at 10 Feet Tall in Cardiff every Tuesday so at the very least I will try and post the results here every week.
(Although if I have a bad week I might leave it!)

Please forgive my crappy scanning!