paintings prints and stuff

Quick sketch - artists demo , pen and pencil on handout leaflet I haven't done any more work on the project - work and life haven't left me the time - hopefully this weekend I'll be able to carry on with the paintings in progress. This is just a quick sketch done to alleviate boredom at a demo by a local artist - I had to borrow a pen from a friend and scribbled it on a handout. It was errrmmm ...... like ..... watching paint dry? It's the silhouette of the camera that shows the action on the large screen behind the head on the right, the projector is on the left. The light on the easel dissolved in blinding light so that you couldn't make it out clearly and it created a pool of light around the figure, everything else dissolving into the semi-darkness. I like the way things dissolve into each other in low light - Caravaggio like. I've decided to make sure I have my sketchbook always with me in future.

Mawgan Porth, Sunny, Wild Day. Watercolour, watercolour pencils and coloured pencils. approx 9 ins square. Vivien Blackburn I decided to have a play with paint and pencils this morning before I have to get ready for the next hospital visit. This is done in watercolour with touches of watercolour pencil and glazes of polychromos coloured pencil to enhance colours, like the pink glow of the wet sand. I really like to use coloured pencil, just a little, over watercolour like this. This is a favourite place for me - the beach that was only a couple of miles from where I lived as a child. It was done from a combination of sketches done plein air and photos I'd taken last year. The day I wanted to capture was sunny and the sea was wild, the horizon a heaving mass of swells and line after line of huge breakers pounding in and crashing against the cliffs in clouds of spray. The clouds were fine., white and hazy. Mawgan Porth , Dusk. Watercolour pencils. 6x7 ins approx. Vivien Blackburn At ...

I was asked to give a talk at a local amateur art group (small) and refused a straight talk but agreed to take work and sketchbooks to show and do a demo of some techniques, rather than finished work, followed by a workshop with help and advice - people love hands on don't they? and I wouldn't be comfortable talking for 2 hours about me! So I did a couple of doodles to show how things worked with mixing media. This one was showing them how oil pastel as a resist with W'col is great - later I added CP and pencil to show the effects ....and finished it off this morning. 6x8 inches. I hadn't actually intended it to be a finished piece, just a demo of techniques, but it was working reasonably well so carried on with it. .... then another one throwing the same mix of media adding chalk pastels. I paint plein air at the coast a lot so was drawing on memories of light and colour, wet pools and the colours of damp sand These are much more finished than the group saw - I'm g...

Tonight was a meeting of a sketch club I've belonged to for a long time, since before I did my degree. It has about 100 members, from keen amateurs to professionals, and meets once a month with crit nights and speakers, days out, studio days, demos and plein air trips. Other groups I belong to are by selection/election but this one is open to anyone keen, regardless of ability. Once a vacancy occurs, it's simply the next on the waiting list. It's a very nice friendly group. Tonight was an artist's talk by Mikki Longley http://www.mikkilongley.co.uk/ who has a background in illustration and has developed her own interesting quirky style, painting local towns and villages in heightened colours and skewed perspectives. She was brilliantly prepared with a powerpoint slide show and projector and explained the ideas behind her work from the beginning, how and why she developed her houses and trees that lean confidingly in towards each other, encircling village squares or chu...