Paintings Prints and Stuff, a blog about painting, drawing, sketching, sketchbooks, works in progress, artists, exhibitions, art books, art classes, printmaking, digital imagery, techniques, art materials ........... and more!
Illustrated ABC
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The cover
Illustrated Alphabet Book for Lucy Christmas 2011, Vivien Blackburn
Vivien Blackburn's work in the Urban/Rural show We've just hung a group show at the The Eye Project, Urban/Rural show. If you want to come and see it it's on for a month - well worth seeing, 11 lovely artists and some fabulous work. Those large canvasses are 40 inches square. There are rural landscapes, flowerscapes, intriguing textile work including a large knitted building, abstracts .... something for everyone. It's in the gallery below the cafe in the Adult Education Centre at the top of Wellington street, Leicester, opposite Fenwicks. Meet the Arttists day is Saturday 1st April 10-2. Come and have a chat with us?
This is a page of watercolour studies of pansies, not intended to be 'a painting', I did a while ago that I came across. It's a grey rainy day and the light isn't good to get on with the canvasses so I decided to try to pull it together as a composition. I used a bit more watercolour and coloured pencils and cropped it and added the soft blue green background to cool it down a little - the colours felt too hot. The deep dark pansies were really velvety and intense and maybe not the colour scheme I would have set out to use with the orange and pale yellows - but the background helps to knit them together. Bringing the soft mauves into the darker flowers also helped. I also took another look at a mixed media woodland that was unfinished and worked a little more on that. It has a little oil pastel in the early stages, watercolour and then coloured pencils.
Detail I have always liked the calligraphic tangle of the hedges when they are sihouetted against the sky. Recent snowfall meant even more opportunities with amazing light and the landscape simplified and hidden by the snow, throwing hedges into relief. Above is a detail of a double page sketch in the lovely Stillman and Birn Beta A4 hardback sketchbook. This paper is so forgiving and the watercolour works beautifully with it. It allowed me to work through wet washes with charcoal pencil - something that tears many papers, leaving holes. Some of the hedge is paint, some tinted charcoal. First snow, more on the way, winter light: silhouetted hedges in watercolour and Derwent tinted charcoal in a Stillman and Birn A4 beta hardback sketchbook The earlier warm golden glow of the low sun is covered by clouds, threatening more snow to come. The spiky calligraphic marks of the hedge and the underlying form of the bank, with some of the taller dried grasses showing