Zooming Out



Jannis

I've done a lot of head and shoulder portrait work recently, so I thought for a change that I would zoom out a bit. Here I've tried to capture Jannis' beautiful holiday photo, which had marvelous sunlight and strong shadows to it. My wife thinks it's a little pale and she is probably right, but a lot of watercolour work does seem to turn out that way. Here I just wanted to catch the light. I also needed to work on the female figure a little too - I've done my best to capture her lovely shape.

Source photo here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/17968702@N06/4742267791/

After the Break

Back in the 1960's, when I passed my driving test, my licence duly arrived through the post. On inspection, I noticed that the expiry date was 2012. "Two thousand and twelve" I exclaimed, "that's a lifetime away!". Well I suppose it was, with me being only 19 at the time. But time has a nasty habit of passing you by or catching you out or playing tricks with your mind.

Now it's 2011 and that licence is about to expire. But where has all that time gone? I know that since being 19, I have got married, had kids, had grandchildren, spent so much time working, had two allotments, spent countless hours doing DIY on two houses, took thousands of photographs etc. The only thing I haven't done enough of is painting, but by 'eck, I intend to continue my quest to change that!

After a lengthy break from painting due to Christmas and New Year activities, as well as struggling to fight off three very bad colds in succession, I've done my first painting for 2011. Oh, happy New Year to all of you by the way! This was a portrait, but I'll post that another time, as just before Christmas I managed to find time to do a painting of two lovely young girls who belong to Debbie and Simon, who very kindly invited us over for Christmas. The painting was a present for our hosts, who saved us from a very plain stop-at-home Yuletide, and also for enabling us not to miss seeing our grandchildren, as they and their mum and dad had also been invited over some time earlier.

The pictures below show the painting at two earlier stages, but alas, time has played tricks on my mind as I have aged over the years, resulting in me completely forgetting to photograph the finished work, which is now many miles away in East Anglia! Oh well, you will just have to judge my work from what you see here.

I now find it easier to work with a photograph on my laptop in front of me these days. This has the added bonus that I can listen to music and even half watch a DVD at the same time! (Kylie Minogue in this instance) I don't however, have Facebook open at the same time now, as friends start distracting me with IM's. It's bad enough when the phone rings during painting, when often all I feel like saying to the person on the other end is, "You're stopping me from painting" LOL!

I wonder what all of you do, if anything while you are painting?