Excitingly, I discovered buff titanium paint this week. I was trying to explain my excitement to a friend last night and they didn't quite understand the colour until I explained that it was like buff paper. Okay, so it may also be called beige on the label, which I think isn't half as good a name, but as Shakespeare said,
"...What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet."
The buff titanium has been very helpful for doing my beach scenes, when white or naples yellow just wasn't giving me the colour mix I was after. Of course, my beach scenes are going to have a couple of quirky items in...Transformers, you ask? Well, no, not in the beach scenes, but the Transformers are still going strong. I finished my diptych last Friday. The iridescent white worked well when mixed in with the purples, blues and greys - a slight shimmer, but not too much. Unfortunately, I think where my paintings are hanging in the corridor there isn't enough sunlight to catch the shimmer so it hasn't picked up in my photo that well.
Well, for the past couple of days I have been crouched over an easel using a tiny brush to paint my Star Wars figures. They are not perfect of course. I am afraid their heads may be a little bit to big and Princess Leia, gosh, well to be honest it was nearing the end of the day and her face is SO small that I found it so hard to get any semblance of nose, eyes, mouth (particularly). I would put one little tiny stroke down and wipe away her previously painted eyes, which were okay, or her mouth or something. So I think the photo I post here is just before the final adjustments I made to her face - I tried to give her a mouth but it may have gone awry. It is always hard to know when to stop messing around with something. Next week I think I will do an Optimus Prime and Shockwave face-off (portraits) on bigger canvases so I don't go quite as mad. It is amazing how many times I start talking about my Transformers and how the face of the person I am talking to lights up. Whoever created them I think was genuinely amazing. It has got to the point where I was walking home with a friend last night and we came across a huge roadwork machine and we said wouldn't it be cool if it transformed and made those transforming clicky sounds.
Yes, guilty as charged. No post for over 2 months. Although people have been using my Titian post as some kind of weird forum and I have to keep using comment moderation to reject their comments. I don't have the heart to delete the post to get rid of the problem as I like the image of Boy with a Pipe too much. So as promised to members of my family, here are photos of my paintings inspired by the last verse of the hymn Be Thou My Vision
High King of heaven, my victory won,
May I reach heaven's joys, O bright heav'ns Son!
Heart of my own heart, whatever befall,
Still be my vision, O ruler of all.
I'm currently doing a project based on strong tonal contrasts (light and dark) on buildings/walls, but unfortunately, the sun didn't shine (well it did, but just behind the dense clouds!) this week so I'm having a few difficulties with getting a good composition. I've been messing around with etching on metal and perspex though which is fun and new for me. Other than that life alternates from being crazy out of control to being bored and not knowing what to do with myself. Well, adios my dear amigos for now. Hope your life is going sweetly and the sun is shining for you!
Back to class this week. Had a great time with mono prints - rolling ink onto aluminium plates, and tracing onto paper with pastels, pencils and charcoal and then pulling off the paper to see what lay underneath. Sometimes disappointment due to too much ink or not enough, othertimes pleasant surprise at what was revealed. I found myself at one time, for the first time perhaps, lost in the enjoyment of tracing the face of the model and not worrying about the end outcome. This print was done using pastels to trace and I had some comments that it looked like Spring, which was cool.
This is some of the work I've done in the class I have on Saturdays. It's always a total struggle to get out of bed to make it to class, but it's definitely been worth it. The first one is using tertiary colours, which were really cool to mix and to work with. The charcoal one is based on a 3D construction I did in class which itself was based on drawings of dead plant matter. Part of the piece I've then recreated into an oil painting which it sounds like it will be part of the student exhibition at Leith School of Art in December. My first time being in an exhibition, pretty exciting! It's cool to now look back and see where the Saturday morning class was headed and to have some output to show. I'm also glad to have such good lecturers!
