paintings prints and stuff

Hearts and Flowers, beaded necklace with lucite flowers, Vivien Blackburn This and others are in my Etsy store now Committments have cut into my painting time lately - but these necklaces I can work on under artificial light in the evening and I'm enjoying playing with colour combinations and beads. Help??? I'd appreciate some advice from you who wear necklaces - what length do you like to wear?  16inch?   18inch?  20 inch?? (that's excluding the pendant flowers).  In the past the ones I've made have been just for me and I'd like to know what lenght you would consider the best generally? Off to do some painting now ............

 oil The Guardian have done an article on skies in art with some great paintings mentioned - here . So I thought I'd trawl through some of my sketches of skies ................ Dawn at Sennen Cove, coloured pencil in moleskine sketchbook charcoal watercolour coloured pencil oil charcoal and coloured pencil oil photo, early morning water soluble brush pen oil oil charcoal coloured pencil watercolour We do have such lovely changeable skies and they are fascinating to try to catch - in whatever medium :>)  Done sitting on cliff tops, in the countryside, on the back of the car as it opens flat  ..... very comfortable when sketching alone if I can park with a good view.  Getting out there and looking is essential to understand the layers, the colours, the way light shines through from behind ............ And - if anyone is interested in the jewellery I've been designing and making, I'm beginning to put it on Etsy in my shop These are some yet to be...

Gold and Black:   Flower necklace, Vivien Blackburn photo taken from above showing the scale of the flowers more accurately Tommorow I'll have time to paint after a spell with very little time. :>) I'll also write another installment in the Key Elements in improving your painting and drawing series over the weekend.  Previous posts One , Two and Three   - click on these to recap or read for the first time. In the meantime I've been learning more bead techniques, brick stitch, ladder stitch and a complex bracelet with picot edging  (some needing much practice if I'm ever going to be any good at them! - they require neatness    8>0 ).   I. Don't (Can 't) . Do. Neat.  : >(     The little (scruffy) samples I produced yesterday won't be seen here!  I'll show you when I'm better. Daisy chain necklace, Vivien Black burn But the techniques learned will feed into my more free form, make-it-up-as-you-go-along,...

I made a spring themed necklace as the weather has a definite, if cool, feel of Spring.  I was really pleased with how it all came together as I'd hoped.  I've not learned a lot yet but I used 2 of the techniques I've learned so far :>) I'm going to do variations on this them, different colours, different seasons. I must update the Etsy shop with paintings - and I may - just may - do a page for some of these when I makes some more.   What do you think?    From a different angle. I had a puncture this morning : > (   and whilst waiting for the AA to come and put the spare on for me, I sketched the trees I could see.  Nothing brilliant but better than being bored : > )   They were done with Derwent Graphitint.   The colours were really suitable for the cool morning light.  It's better in real life though, the photo doesn't show up the colours quite well enough. I'll carry on with the series of issues to...

Digital experiment with small abstracts. Vivien Blackburn I'm working out options for this series.   The original ones were manipulated in photoshop, playing with colour variations and rotating/flipping. I quite like the idea of doing a series of 9 framed liked this on either black or white. Which do you prefer for the background - black or white? I think the white background has a clean freshness but the black has an added glow.  

Another in series of tiny abstracts, playing with the interaction of colour, shape and space This one was done using Derwent's studio pencils over an inktense underpainting, on Fisher 400 paper.   I like the way that Derwent's Coloursoft pencils work with this paper better, though these worked well, the Coloursofts were richer when used like this (not so on normal paper). Working with the underpainting allows me to create the same sort of effects that I can achieve in oils - changing subtly or overlaying very different colour opaquely,  and is a really useful way of playing with colour and ideas.   and another variation with the same materials  and there's more ..... I may arrange them in a grid, keeping each element small with the grid black or a deep linking colour - decisions decisions .... what do you think?

 detail from step by step Well ..... secret project is secret no more  : > ) Derwent Artbars Last summer I was asked to take part in testing Derwent's newest baby - Artbars , then in the lab under development.   They will be available in the next couple of weeks and are now on the Derwent website.   Rocks near Porthgwarra, Derwent Artbars, on A2 cartridge paper, Vivien Blackburn It was really interesting being involved in trying them out from the short-stumps-of-colour-and-varied-composition/shape etc at the beginning and following their progression.   I still have a little container of these stumps. In this one, that they commissioned after the initial testing, the only other medium used is a little white gouache for those areas where I didn't retain the white of the paper for the incoming waves.   In other places it is simply the white paper. In the one above,  I was wanting to build an intensity of col...