A Change of Direction?

After the Storm Over Rape Field. 305 x 210 mm watercolour and pen.

A Change of Direction?
This is my first foray into cubism. I've never really liked Picasso’s cubism works or cubism in general, until I came across Barry Coombs. It is his watercolour works that inspired me to paint this landscape, which is something of a departure for me.

This painting may look familiar, as I've done this scene before as a normal watercolour (see picture below), but this time I wanted to keep it very simple and colourful and have tried to introduce some cubism element to the work. I think you’ll agree this version is a complete transformation.

I've used three primary colours (French ultramarine blue, cadmium red and cadmium yellow) with a little cerulean blue added, mixing large amounts of each and adding as much pigment as possible. Just seeing those three gorgeous colours in my palette dish in all their bright splendour was a real turn on and it felt so exciting to lay them down and drop them into each other on the paper!

I'm already hooked on this style of painting, and I think I may have to change the name of this blog from Frank’s Watercolour Revival to Frank’s Watercolour Discovery, as I seem to be finding out new ways of doing things all the time!

My original version

30 Tourists Part 2

Work on my current acrylic project is slow, and going to be a lot harder than I first thought. The faces are turning out to be more time consuming than I really wanted, and for some reason, skin tones are proving unusually difficult. Never mind, I will work it out!

This time I gave the whole canvas a light wash of  burnt sienna, taking care not to hide the pencil work too much and to stop those annoying white bits showing through my work. This also makes it easier when adding whitish highlights. The way I like to work is to treat each small area of the work one piece at a time, then move on, gradually building up to the finished painting. The layering that a lot of artists do, I'll leave for my watercolour work.

30 Tourists - Part 2. Acrylic on stretched canvas.

What Happens When I Die?

30 Tourists - Part one

30 Tourists. Drawing on Canvas for Acrylic Paint (20x50cm).

This week at the South Leicestershire Art Group (SLAGs), I started a new project. After doing three lengthy architectural works, I decided a change of subject would give me more of a challenge and stop me from getting into a rut doing the same old thing, and boy what a challenge this one is turning out to be.

After picking up this long canvas for a bargain price at Dunelm Mill, I wondered a little about what to do with it. I had one or two photos in mind and ended up choosing a cropped photo of a crowd scene outside the gates into Horse Guards Parade in Whitehall, London. It was eventually a toss-up between this and a thin wide view of the buildings from the parade ground. All of these young tourists were busy taking photos of the  guards in their bright red coats guarding the venue. It must have seemed quite strange therefore to them that I was only interested in taking a photo of them. But you see, being an artist, I have constant subconscious thoughts of what would be a good subject for my next painting project!

Well, getting back to SLAGs, the reaction from fellow members on seeing my photo and blank canvas was to laugh, and quips like "You've got your work cut out there" and "You are a gluten for punishment"! Well maybe I have and I am, but one thing's for sure, I'm going to have a great time working it all out and getting to know all the little quirkiness of the characters on the canvas as I paint them.

As well as painting, our weekly meetings consist of a fair amount of chatter, and as most of us are getting on a bit, it wasn't surprising that the subject of death came up and what we thought about it! It mostly centred around what happens to us when we die and where our ashes are to be scattered. It was most amusing when one lady said that she kept changing her mind, and her son who was a farmer said to her "Oh don't worry, when you're gone, I'll put your ashes in the muck-spreader and spread you onto the fields"!

The preliminary sketch above, may seem rather detailed for an acrylic painting, but it gives me precise details to work to, which has come in handy for my recent architectural studies. Here I've used the 'squaring-up' method to enlarge the photo to the scale of the canvas, (the corresponding squares on the photo obviously  being much smaller). I usually leave unwanted features out or move them around slightly, but this one remains pretty true to the source photo. This sketch still remained tricky, taking me around four hours to complete.

Now for the paint!

Old Grammar School, Market Harborough

I've lived in the busy town of Market Harborough for many years now and spent a lot of my working hours pounding the streets delivering milk, not just in the town, but surrounding villages as well. Despite this familiarity with my environment, I never cease to be amazed at the diversity and detail of the architecture of our older buildings. The one I've photographed and painted here is the Old Grammar School, which was founded by Robert Smyth in 1614. It has the unusual feature of standing on huge oak legs, the ground floor section was apparently the home of a butter market in years gone by. It has seen a few cosmetic changes over recent years, but except for the addition of a brick staircase in 1868, the building remains a quaint and beautiful focus for the town centre.

Painting it has raised a few challenges for me and taken quite some time to complete. The size of the painting (40x30cm) is a fair bit larger than my source photo and has been painted with acrylics. It remains true to detail other than a tree in the foreground which spoilt the composition so I left it out! Also, the sky in my photograph was very grey after the rain shower that got me wet before I took it. This I changed using an earlier photo of a more blusterous sky taken at another location last year. I find it helps to take photographs wherever I go, whenever I can, as this gives me a constant supply of things I can use in subsequent paintings even though I may only use small parts of the image. The picture below shows the work at it's varying stages.

Last Autumn I joined the South Leicestershire Art Group (SLAGs), which is a small, informal group that meets every Tuesday morning to have a chat and paint together for a couple of hours in a church centre. Having this small point in time each week set aside for painting  has been a fantastic boost to my work, both in terms of quantity and quality, and is something I constantly look forward to. Long live SLAGs!

This shows the work at various stages.

A New Venture

Speckled Hen. Acrylic 20 x 20cms on stretched canvas
box frame £30

While looking through my photos for some inspiration for a painting recently, I came across a few shots of some bantams that I had taken at Coton Manor in Northamptonshire. Although the speckled hen here took up only a very small part of the photo, I was able to examine the bird in more detail using the computer to zoom in on a potential image.
The result was this acrylic painting of this fine specimen of a Belgium Bantam hen. She was running loose with a few other hens, as well as a cock bird, in lovely long grass filled with bluebells and cowslips - a very English background indeed.

Now the reason for this painting appearing in this post when the title is "A New Venture", is because I have set myself up with an online art shop, and this painting is the first item I added for sale. Although I've only been up and running for a few days, I've managed to list a few of my recent paintings and greetings cards that I have had professionally printed from these, as well as an old chair that I brought back to life. Hopefully the shop will grow,especially as I have more time for painting now, and I will sell lots of paintings and live happily ever after! Hmmmm, maybe that will be wishful thinking, but I did mention on Facebook that my new shop was open for business, and promptly made a sale - the morning sunrise painting I showed you in my last blog! It is now winging its way to the USA

For those interested to see what I am selling, here's the link:
http://folksy.com/shops/franksartshop

The View from my Back Door

Since I've been retired, I am at home and have time to just look out of the kitchen window a lot. For a few mornings now, while gazing up at the sky I have noticed some lovely cloud formations at daybreak. Reaching for my trusty camera and taking a step outside the back door, I take a photograph, then the next day another and so forth. It is a natural progression to translate these photos into paintings, and here is one I did later!

Morning Promise: watercolour on 300gsm 140lb Bokingford paper

Having done quite a few acrylic paintings lately, my wife asked me to do something wet-in-wet, and what better subject for this technique than clouds? A simple subject like this is so easy to do, and took me around 30 minutes - a welcome break from intricate detailed studies that I've been working on of late.

Lengthy Paintings

Acrylic on stretched canvas frame

I know I've said in the past that 2-3 hours spent on a painting is as much as I can bear, and this is especially true with watercolour work, but things have been changing around here.

A few weeks ago I joined a group of people who love to paint, and meet once a week, hiring out a room and spending a couple of hours or so just painting and chatting to each other. There is no tutor, so the cost is minimal, there's a very relaxed atmosphere and it's great to have a look at what each other is doing with their artwork.

At the same time, I've strayed further away from watercolour in favour of acrylics. My subject matter is also more elaborate, requiring much more thought and time getting it down on canvas.

The painting here done at the group meetings has taken me around one month to complete. Well, I say complete, but when is a painting ever finished? There is still more that I can do to it, and unlike watercolour, it doesn't go muddy on you if you start fiddling! But, there comes a point when we have to stop and say "That's enough".

The building is Old Place Yard, London, England, and is worked 'eye to hand' from a photograph I took on a visit last October. I'm not sure what the building is used for but think that it is something to do with parliament, as it stands on Abingdon Street, with the Houses of Parliament standing just across the road from it. To the rear, is the Jewel Tower.

Pictures below show WIP.

Birthday Cards

Despite my more-than-usual busy life at the moment, I did take time to paint a couple of birthday cards. This one was for my daughter-in-law, of our lovely grandson Thomas. I don't always get a good likeness, but this one turned out fairly good. I think she really liked it.

Painting someone a card is very rewarding, doesn't take long at this size (C5), and I think that being a piece of  original artwork, gives the receiver an incentive to keep it rather than discard the card in the recycling box a couple of days after the event. I would dearly loved to have kept this one, but I know it will be looked after by it's owner, and whenever I've visited since, the card is still on display. How nice is that?