I did order some mugs which arrived this morning, and they look remarkably like the mock-ups I showed earlier, so I'm really pleased. I still have some available so contact me if you'd like one - £10 plus p&p.
The idea is to take a plain white piece of paper and make a dot wherever there is some small fault or mark in the paper. These days, paper is so pure it's hard to find any blemishes, so I tried another method, which is to use printed paper. I selected the letter E in each block of text (I could have chosen a word or a punctuation mark, or vowels and so on). Having made dots, the next step is to join them together in any way you like. This is my first go at it...
It would be an option to make the dots on tracing paper and create a drawing without the actual underlying entropy, but I thought it would be more interesting to do the first one 'showing the workings' as it were.
Last night I went to a meeting of my Creative Exchange group. I try to provide some sort of activity or game to spark off our creative discussions so I thought we'd do some "Entropic Graphomania".
Take a block of text and mark some chosen attribute. Then you link the marks together with some free-form lines in whatever way you like. Can be coloured in too. I made two, using tracing paper to make the marks from the text, so you don't see the actual text.
In the first one, I selected the words "was" (blue marks) and "is" (pink marks). It all turned a bit 1920s Vogue!
The second one was marked on the letter 'a'. I circled and looped the marks and it looked like frogspawn, so when it was all joined up, I coloured it as a frog (a frog-like creature anyway).
I bought a pack of 30 largish flat pebbles to paint. I've done three of the flat ones and a couple of chunkier rocks that I got from the Reading Kindness Rocks group...
Oh wow, what a marathon!
31 drawings from Jake Parker's Inktober prompt words.
See the full set of 31 drawings in my Facebook Album here:
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?vanity=LornaWebberVipond&set=a.1190709887734631
Notes for a workshop for the Kennet Valley Art Group:
With still
life, you are in total control of your subject matter. Your subject doesn’t move about while you’re
trying to paint it. Usually, you can
control the lighting. You can spend as
long as you like choosing and arranging your subject matter until you find an
interesting and satisfying composition.
You can
make a statement with a still life – about certain visual qualities, about the
transience of things, the relationships between things, the meaning of specific
objects… whatever appeals to you.
Look at Morandi, Cezanne, Picasso, Chardin, Dutch masters.
Composing your subject
A few simple guidelines…
·
Choose objects that are related in some way. Have a ‘theme’.
·
Consider the background right from the start.
·
Make some very quick thumbnail sketches to work out
your composition, in terms of
shapes
and major tonal areas.
·
Try to get a flow through the painting, to draw the
viewer’s eye around the picture.
·
Avoid clashing edges, where things touch but don’t
overlap.
·
Don’t leave vast amounts of space around your subject.
·
Aim for balance but not symmetry.
Negative space
Negative
space is any area in your painting that is NOT a specific object. It consists of the shapes around and between
things.
Since
watercolour is a transparent medium, you can’t paint light on top of dark, or a
colour on top of its complement – the underlying wash will show through.
You can paint dark on light. That’s fine where the object is darker than
what surrounds it, but what if the object is lighter? Well, then you paint the negative area behind or between your objects.
This is
tremendously useful in watercolour, as it enables you to paint a broad, loose wash,
and then a darker wash to ‘cut out’ the object.
Much better than painting each shape separately like painting by
numbers. It does take a bit of thought!
EDGES –
think about the type of edge you want; soft
blend into another shape (wet on wet), or hard
edge giving definition (wet on dry). If
in doubt, fade it out.
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| Teresa's Garden |
You have to consider tonal values. These are used to define form and depth and, in monochrome work, can indicate colour.
You have to consider colour. This divides into choices of hue and intensity.
You can use tone or colour or a combination of both, depending on the effect you want, but either colour or tone should dominate - i.e. don't have a lot of colour and a lot of tonal variation.
If the artwork is mainly tonal, the colour should be secondary. Make sure you organise good, big areas of similar tones. This will make your art look good from a distance and give it strength. Think Rembrandt, Picasso. Don't have little darks and lights dotted about. Choose your hues to suit the required tone...for example, you can't paint a low key painting with yellows which have a naturally high key.
If the artwork is mainly about colour, have most of your colours in the same tonal range. See Ittens's colour/tone grid . Think Van Gogh, Bonnard.
When using mainly colour, you won't be able to get much depth in your painting. You can still represent the direction of light by using colour intensity. Intense (pure saturated colours) will appear to glow with light. Dull, muddy colours will sink into shade, even if they are quite light tonally.
Each hue has a natural tone at which it is most intense. For example, yellow is most intense (pure, brilliant) in light tones. As you make yellow darker, it becomes duller. Blue is most intense in the mid range, less so in high tones (white added) or low tones (black added). Red is naturally dark. This is really clear in the Ittens grid.
To make all the areas of a painting sit comfortably together, you have to lay down neighbouring colours and tones that match. That way, they can all talk to each other, without one element shouting everything else down. Try for harmony but with some contrast.
I have a few projects in hand at the moment:
Planning paintings involves working out why I want to paint a thing, doing a quick blind contour drawing and then planning the painting as though it were an abstract, before starting work on the actual piece.
I've been given a lot of large canvases by another artist, who is encouraging me to work over them. I'm not at all sure about this as his practice is completely different from mine, but I'll give it a try.
The Equinox project is a local art exhibit, representing the changing seasons. There will be a number of posts of varying lengths, positioned in a meadow next to the Thames. The posts will have hand-made and decorated terracotta pipes piled on them, topped with some kind of 'finial'. I've been asked to make one or more of the finials.
I decided to go for Spring and Autumn.
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| Photo credit: Lucy Rowntree |
