Animals

Seems to be an animal theme today. Sadly the photo's are just too rubbish to share individually.

Getting Into The Swing

For the last couple of days I've been doing non-art stuff mainly so it was nice to get into the studio again today.

This is the first day I've not had to think about my materials too much and could therefore concentrate more on colour and mark making - there is always more to learn but progress is being made - and I'm now up to 11 paintings, which should give me a bit of leeway.

Classic Bahookie

So today I got to experiment with my new brushes and the Michael Harding medium.

First I painted the four lioness ladies, using the soft brushes on a board to which I had applied a layer of burnt sienna.

The paint flowed much better than previously and I was fairly happy with the result. But I was itching to try the medium.

And this is the result - much more painterly and flowing, generally just managed to control the paint better. Using the dark background that I'd prepared a few days ago also let me really concentrate on the lights. Definitely and improvement!

Day 3 - Shopping!

Today I went shopping, for soft brushes and medium. Some Sap Green and Manganese may have jumped into my basket as well - which is nice as I have recently added both colours to my basic palette, expanding it from seven colours to nine.

Tomorrow I'll give them a spin (and possibly liquin as well - in smaller sizes it is only available in childproof containers, which unfortunately are also Jane proof. However my studio-mate Louise Scott has promised to lend me a little bit).

So look for an update tomorrow!

Pericles

Day 2 and I am experimenting with my materials, after having problems yesterday.

Initially I tried again with the same methods and although I quite like the resulting painting (furthest left) it was a bit of a pain to paint.

So next time, the first thing I changed was putting a layer of burnt sienna down and then wiping it off, in the hope that this will make my painting surface less grabby. This worked beautifully for Pericles, which is painted on linen. Then I used dark paint thinned with turps to lay down a drawing and then used paper towel and turps to lighten areas. Next I tried actually painting and soon ran into trouble. Changing to a soft brush made all the difference though and I was able to lay down a fairly solid area. However, the biggest soft brush I have is only about a cm across, so clearly I need to go shopping.

The lack of a big brush showed up even more in my next painting, The Egyptian Duo. This one is on gessoed board and I really struggled getting the paint to flow in any reasonable way. This is a shame as it is fairly easy to get boards in small sizes and generally for my other work I prefer them.

This afternoon I'm going to put a layer of paint onto a few of these boards and let them dry. Hopefully that'll help, along with bigger brushes!

2016 - The Year To Come

The start of a new year, time for new beginnings, and I know that non-art commitments are going to keep me very busy for the next six months at least.

So I have decided that painting at least one little painting every day I can make it to the studio will keep things ticking over. It will also let me experiment quicker with my materials, with methods, with composition, paint application and colour - in short, with pretty much every aspect of picture making.

So I have promised myself to paint a hundred paintings over the next hundred days. Most of these will be small oil studies although I will count bigger paintings and possibly drawings, depending on what I am working on as the time goes on. Each work only gets counted once, though, even if I spend more than one day on it. To start with the little studies will be museum interiors - like the lady dancing above, who is from the British Museum. This is because I have been thinking a lot about composition and depth recently, as well as looking at how different people have portrayed the human form previously. But who knows what I'll be painting by the end of the time!

Anyway, I will be posting them (good and bad) here, facebook and at @glasgwjane on twitter. All encouragement very welcome!

The Year That Was - 2015

Time to look back before moving forward - what have I achieved this year?

It has been strange and often frustrating. In May I had an operation on my hand which although successful has left me in a fair bit of pain and limited severely my ability to paint for the best part of six months. This lead me to working in graphite and focusing on the planning stages. It meant I had time to meet lots of new people, who came to the studio to pose. In the end I had over twenty thousand reference photographs of models, which is pretty amazing and gives me a lot of freedom to make new paintings.

Using the graphite, especially liquid pencil, has freed up my mark making and let me be more experimental, since each drawing only takes a few hours. Being more selective about which images become paintings has led to a higher rate of finished work - something that became very useful when I started painting again in October, with only a couple of months to paint enough paintings for all the christmas shows.

Some of these shows were in new places - The RSA, The lovely Smithy Gallery, Leiper Fine Art and The Fotheringham Gallery - others were in old favourites such as the Glasgow Art Club and Art Exposure Gallery. My favourite show though was probably Alice at 150 in Mansfield Park Gallery - there was so much creativity in the exhibition it was a real honour to be involved.

So overall despite the difficulties I feel that I'm in a really good place for the coming year - and more on that tomorrow!