paintings prints and stuff

Cardoon seedheads, lifesize sketch in Folio Moleskine Sketchbook, pencil and coloured pencil details: These are last years seedheads and one is splitting and the fluffy centre is spilling out, contrasting beautifully with the spiky scales of the outside. So interesting to draw :>)

Autumn Fruits, coloured pencil in moleskine folio (8.5 x 11.5 inch pages) I did a still life set up with a friend today - not something I normally do. He'd set up this mix of fruits and a couple of glorious deep purple/burgundy onions. It isn't finished by a good way, it was just a sketchbook exercise, but you can see I enjoyed doing that onion and the time I spent on it by the lack of darks worked up to balance it elsewhere! I ran out of time to deepen them further. To make a balanced composition it really needs more darks - which shows even more clearly when it's turned to greyscale below ..... details below .......... I like to use coloured pencils in a scribbly way, overlaying colours and building the subtle changes - for instance with yellows, sugar pink, magenta, burgundy, cadmium red, orange and I can't remember what else in the melon to try to catch the juicy glow of it. If I were to finish it then I'd work on the 2 right hand pears to make them 3D, pus...

Birches and Pool - changes - work in progress OK - this is where it is now. I decided to crop it a little and move the elements on the left in, lose some off the top where it was throwing the balance a bit and have a border around, which will show between the painting and the off white mat between it and a pale wood frame. The colour balance is a little better in this one, closer to the painting What do you think?

Work in progress, collage and mixed media: Birches and Pool. Vivien Blackburn Leading on from those previous studies and sketches done from trees plein air - this is the piece currently being worked out, abstracting and developing the work. This one may be going to America. It's 11x14 - I'd really like to be doing this much bigger but that's the size it has to be for this show. Details: The top and the sides are a sort of ambiguous border - elements overlap and weave across but it is disjointed and separate from the central part. The top section has yet to be finished but most of the rest is complete. All the trees are separate pieces of paper/painting and the background and foreground terrain are collage (papers that I've painted myself, cut and torn). You can read a bit more about it here Feedback welcome - any thoughts anyone? Click on the above image for further work on trees

Moonrise, coloured pencil 11x14 inches A moody moonlit view in coloured pencil - another in the series for the upcoming show. There is another nearly finished which I'll show as soon as it's done, which plays with collage. I've been finding it hard to get time to paint/draw lately with work and family commitments. I'm really wanting to get some big canvasses out but first I need to finish this series of small works. Feedback and critique welcome :>) PS - ALERT - Bloglines is closing down :>( I'm going to miss it as I liked having one place to track anything I read. If you subscribe with Bloglines you'll need to choose another method. Maybe Follow with Google??