Latest Work in Progress

Latest Work in Progress

It is nice to get back to this portrait of Bentley in acryl gouache. The photo is of a small area to show how much more work I have to do to finish. If I show the full image you would think it is nearly finished but the minute I sat down and looked at it I could see that I still have a lot to do. 

When I am working in acryl gouache I use very small spotter brushes and lay the strokes of paint one at a time in layers. You can see a medium grey at the bottom right waiting for strokes of sepia and dark grey to build up the effect of fur. The difficulty is where there are white hairs lying over dark hair. 

Acryl gouache is lovely to work with because the paint doesn’t dry hard for a few days so mistakes can be lifted. Also it is opaque which means that I will be able to layer clean white hairs over the dark areas.

The nose is a completely different kind of texture. I expect that the spotter brush will live up to its name when I get there!

I should mention that the strip of white thick paper is to rest my hand on to protect the paint from grease.

Housework

Housework 

I wrote last week about how I couldn’t work on my paintings because I had a bad cold. This last week I did very little because I was spending my time catching up with housework. 

The photo shows the corner of my bedroom where I used to do my best paintings before I moved my old cat in there and the room became full of scratching barrel, cat litter tray, food and water bowls... You get the idea. Also my latest rescue cat, Jet, is territorial and lurked outside my bedroom marking. I didn’t like it when he scratched the banister handrail. It gave me splinters in my hand. So I set up my studio easel downstairs and worked there despite the cats jumping on my work table. 

So, the old cat having died and having got over the worst of my cold, I did a lot of sorting out my house. 

The best thing is that I have my table easel set up again and Bentley is already being worked on there. 

I like this space next to the window with lots of north light. It is upstairs so I am not shadowed by the houses opposite and neighbours’ cars and vans. (I can cope with grey ones, but brightly coloured cars outside the window reflect strange lights on my portraits.)

You may have noticed the step ladder under the table. If you look at the top corner you can see blackish marks on the photo. They are caused by damage to the plaster from rain coming through the wall which has been fixed now. I will need the steps to climb up and repair it. I will do that after I have finished Bentley. I don’t want to drip plaster on him!

I want to spend more time painting. 

I only have two serious distractions. One is my pets, but that is a welcome and enjoyable distraction. The other distraction is housework. I am trying hard to organise my home so that housework is easier. 

I tried blocking in time to dedicate to artwork. That is the recommendation for getting things done. But it doesn’t work for me. I can’t concentrate on painting when there is dog hair all over the place. (One friend called it tumbleweed.) And NO! I am not getting rid of the dogs. 

So my solution is to schedule Housework time. That means that I have the rest of the day to paint. 

As for organising my house, I have plans to rearrange the kitchen. I designed the kitchen when I didn’t have any cats. I always had dogs but they were no trouble until I had to keep them out of the cat litter and stop them from eating the cat food. I am going to take the lower shelves out of the small alcove and buy a corner kitchen base cupboard which I am going to use to hide the cat litter trays and hopefully store cat food too. Then I am going to feed the cats on the higher shelves in the alcove. Meanwhile I will replace the storage space with a tall wide but shallow cupboard which will go behind the kitchen table. At the moment I have a desk behind the table and that will go in my bedroom to hold my best printer. 

I have other plans too, but they are waiting for the kitchen to be finished. 

Saddle Stool

Saddle Stool

When I want to concentrate on painting at my easel, the most important thing is what I am sitting on. 

As I am disabled, (I had polio when I was a baby giving me paralysis in my right leg) my gluteus maximus on my left is much bigger than the one on my right. This means that I am lopsided when I sit. Sitting can be very painful, giving me, not backache, but waist ache. So I buy a lot of working chairs, in hopes of finding a comfortable one. My last purchase was a lovely chair but a disaster for me to sit on. I kept tipping sideways and my waist and leg ached with the effort of trying to stay vertical. 

I have been thinking about getting a saddle stool for a long time and yesterday this noble stool arrived (photo above). So far remaining vertical is no problem at all. Getting on it can be awkward because of the hump at the front. Does one call it a pommel on a stool? But I am getting the hang of it and once I am in front of the easel I feel secure and can concentrate on painting and not pain.

The cats are giving the saddle stool dirty looks. It isn’t good for curling up and sleeping. 

I have returned to the painting of Arthur. I am improving four of my portraits in oils on canvas to put into the Art in the Hills exhibition in Dufton Village Hall later this month. The portrait part of the photo has got bleached out by the sunshine so you can’t see what alterations I have made, but I have added a mixture of burnt umber and prussian blue into the shadows and Arthur’s shirt has come to life. I am so pleased with it that I am going to add some prussian blue to the shadows on his face. 

Because the exhibition is coming up soon, I have bought some quick drying mediums. I have 3 different makes to try. First I bought Winsor and Newton Artisan fast drying medium but I didn’t like the smell. So I have bought bottles of Holbein Duo Aqua quick drying liquid, which doesn’t have a smell, and Royal Talens Cobra quick drying medium. I haven’t opened the Cobra one yet because I read that it causes yellowing and also I prefer the consistency of the Duo Aqua paints so it is natural for me to use their medium first. 

You may well prefer the Cobra paints if you come from painting in traditional oil paints. I started by working in dry pastel and the Duo Aqua paints have a drier consistency. I even blend them with my fingers on the canvas sometimes as I would in pastel. 

The reason why I stopped painting in pastel is that I got post polio syndrome and couldn’t grip my pastels. Post polio syndrome is when bits of me that had been working (in this case my right hand) stopped working. I have recovered to the point where I can hold pencils and paintbrushes, and I have tried pastel pencils which have improved a lot since the days when I painted exclusively in pastel, but pastels have to be framed and framing is expensive. Oil on canvas doesn’t need to be framed, which is an important consideration when painting for an exhibition. 

Gypsy Portraits Changing Expectations Exhibition.

Gypsy Portraits Changing Expectations Exhibition 

Appleby is crowded with visitors to the Appleby Horse Fair, and horses of all shapes and sizes. If you drive this way be very careful. I heard today that a small child running from between caravans got run over, and has a broken leg. We don’t want any more injuries. Children will always get excited and not look where they are going. 

My exhibition is set up and attracting positive attention from locals and visitors. 

This is a visual post. Here are more photos of the portraits. 

360 degree Rotating Canvas Attachment.

360 degree Rotating Canvas Attachment

I have bought a 360 degree rotating attachment for my easel which you can see above. It took me a while to work out how to attach my reference photos close to the portrait. I was looking in all those places that one puts one’s household bits and pieces for hooks and things, and I found some Command Strips for hanging pictures. That inspired me to use them to hold a piece of plywood in place. I can clip my reference photos to it. You can see it works well. 

I think Jet wanted to get into the photo. He likes sitting on my painting table. The challenge is to keep his tail out of the wet paint. 

I knew for some time about this attachment for an easel so a canvas can be rotated. But I didn’t know if it would fit my easel. I have a rotating drawing board cum table easel that I have set up in my bedroom and I have been using it for years for drawing and painting in acrylics. However it won’t hold a canvas and there’s nowhere to set it up downstairs. 

Once my exhibition is over I have an acrylic portrait of a dog to finish. It is particularly useful to have a rotating easel for painting an animal’s fur because of hair being linear. It will be nice to paint Bentley downstairs. 

Brighteyes is nearly finished. His clothes look blotchy because it is the undercoat, and I concentrated on covering the canvas quickly. Now he is going back onto the picture shelves to dry. I have a dehumidifier working to speed it up. 

Brighteyes

Brighteyes

This portrait of a little boy, in oil on canvas, is coming along nicely. 

I started to paint his blonde hair full of different shades. I was mainly using gold ochre and raw umber. The hair was fairly dry by this morning so I thought I should put in the highlights. Then I had an idea to make the colour more subtle by mixing in transparent white. I had never used transparent white before. It is definitely different from ordinary white oil paint. So I painted transparent white over all his hair and I am leaving it to dry to see what happens.

Talking of hair, after I put him on the picture shelf to dry, I took down the portrait of his girl cousin who has an elaborate plaited hairstyle. I didn’t take a photo of her portrait because it hasn’t yet got sufficient nose or mouth to stop her looking like an alien. I don’t want anyone to see her looking like that. 

I was puzzling about how to paint her hair, when I remembered that my hairdresser was coming today. So I left the girl’s portrait on the easel and my lovely hairdresser, Sue, explained how the hair should look in my painting! I hope to post the finished result next week.

I am so lucky with the technical help I am getting with these portraits.

The Bronze Cat finished

 

The Bronze Cat finished 

I finished the painting of the bronze cat at last. 

I am pleased with how well I succeeded with the tiger's eye on the left using glazes. The Connemara marble is satisfactorily chunky using a pointillist technique in shades of grey over a green glaze. 

The fool's gold was tricky to paint. I used metallic paint in light gold more for fun than for effect. But the key to capturing it was the dark shadows setting off the highlights. 

I don't know what the other crystals are. 

I am pleased with the light green crystal on the left. It had a white reticulated pattern interspersed with dark green areas and the light reflecting off it bleached the pattern. That took a few glazes to get the light areas the right shade. 

The light blue had a lot of tiny dots of white over blue and then blue glazes to take the white back to the right shade. That was easy as was the large brown crystal on the right. But that one was mainly dots of light shades of ochre glazed with sepia. 

The other crystals were straight forward to paint using glazes.

Painting of a bronze cat.

 

Painting of a bronze cat. 

This little bronze statue of an Egyptian cat was given to me by a friend who had treasured it for a long time. I promised her a painting of it in exchange.  

I worked out a still life composition with crystals. I am not sure what the crystals are, except for the lumpy "fool's gold" in the centre and the big grey lump which is unpolished Connemara marble. 

The painting of the cat figure has been done for some time but I am finding the Connemara marble a challenge. I am painting layers upon layers in little dots of greys with hints of green and yellow. It is taking hours. I take as long as I need to get it right. 

I have painted Connemara marble before but that was in pastel on textured paper. This time I am working in Acryl gouache on a very smooth surface so I have to paint the texture rather than letting the materials suggest it for me. 

The texture isn't the biggest challenge. It is hard to describe such an irregular shape. 

The rounded polished stones will be easy. I am a little bit worried about the fool's gold. I don't think it will be as difficult as the Connemara marble. It has flat facets which are easier to depict even if the shape is irregular.