Over the past 6 weeks I have taken part in a second on-line course called Find Your Voice (FYV) with Louise Fletcher. This is a follow on to the Find Your Joy (FYJ) course. You can read my review, including my results, from FYJ here. The purpose of this second course was to continue to focus on developing our own personal voices. But with an intention in mind and looking at 4 key painting principles: tone; composition; colour and mark making.
Continue reading
I’ve delivered a wide variety of exciting commissioned illustration projects throughout 2019. These include: a number of building-related commercial pieces. A wedding in Cheshire. Several key reportage (visual journalism) illustration projects and a book cover! Although I have shared some of these projects in dedicated blogs, this blog is an overview of some of these illustration projects.
Continue reading
Over the past 10 weeks I’ve taken part in an inspiring on-line painting course: Find Your Joy with Louise Fletcher. After taking a short taster course in August I was really intrigued and motivated to do more! This isn’t your usual painting course!!
Continue reading
In September I was fortunate enough to spend a week on the west coast in Wales. The weather, starting to show signs of autumn, with a nip in the air and colours of change, held up. I spent most days walking ( the Pembrokeshire coastal path) and sketching. I love autumn!
In a previous blog, I explained some of the approaches I am taking to my mixed media collage works. You can read it here. Recently I’ve been working on two new mixed media collage pieces. They are based on a series of Oldham sketches. It’s proving to be a bit of a challenge to say the least!
Continue reading
Over the last couple of years I have started to create mixed media collage art. In the last few months I have started to evolve them in a different, less literal direction. This blog post reflects on this new start point.
This last week I took part in the oneweek100people challenge, promoted through the Urban sketchers social media sites. The idea is that you post your people sketches on line each day and try to hit 100 in the week. This is the first year I actually completed the task and it got me thinking about the importance of continued practice, continually learning and honing skills. This is important both to improve my own art but also to be a good teacher. In two weeks time I will be starting my own series of sketchbook sketching day workshops in my studio.
Continue reading
The final blog of this 3-part series is about the future direction of my collage work. You can read parts 1 and 2 here. . My collage exploration through 2018 has been informed by my illustration and ‘sense of place’ fascination. I am now keen to immerse myself more in the media as a way of loosening myself up . I intend to become more exploratory and intuitive in my approach.
Continue reading
In this second of 3 blogs reviewing my collage progress in 2018, I am going to discuss collage materials and media. The first blog sharing my works from this year is here. I am not claiming to have developed these techniques off the top of my head. Those interested in collage materials will no doubt of tried and used many of the elements I will discuss. However, all of the work I am presenting on my blogs is my own and the final results represent my own way of seeing and creating. It’s important, once you have an understanding of techniques and your own areas of interest, to follow your own path. There is plenty of opportunity for that with collage!
Continue reading
Over the last 12 months I have started my journey into collage creation. It has not been without its ups and downs. I am used to drawing from life, using pens, ink and watercolour. However, I also crave texture in my visual work. The materiality of things, their physical form and the feel of their surfaces fascinates me. I am interested in how that materiality is connected with creating a sense of place. In addition, composition and colour are important aspects of my visual studies. Mixed media and collage in particular, are therefore obvious media for my exploration. Moreover, they enable individuality and an opportunity for endless experimentation!
In this series of 3 blogs, I’m going to share some of the inspirations and approaches I’ve taken so far. I will also discuss some of the techniques and media that I’ve started to explore more recently. The aim is that these additional approaches will help support a particular uniqueness and ‘own voice’ to my work.
Those of you that follow me on my blog and on my social media platforms will realise that I have been developing my collage work for a while, alongside my sketching work (see previous Urban Sketching in Porto blog). However, my trip to Porto is the first time that I have developed my urban collaging pieces out on location. Collage for me is a natural mixed media technique. With a background in landscape design and an interest in the materiality of things, it gives me the opportunity to explore both texture and composition and to present them in a finished piece of art. This blog shares the approach I have taken to develop the sketchbook pieces and explains their possible future development. Continue reading
Since January of this year I’ve been working on a Chorlton exhibition of my work called: From Chorlton To The City. The exhibition will be held at The World Peace Cafe, The Kadampa Meditation Centre, Chorlton. The preview is on Friday 4 th May 5-8 pm. In this first part of a two-part discussion about the work, I’ll explain what the exhibition is all about.
This weekend (July 15th 2017) I attended my first ever proloco event in Longridge Lancashire. The Create Longridge event was launched in September 2016 and challenges artists to create a brand new, original piece of art, from scratch, in one day. And what a day it was! I decided to attend after seeing the event on social media. I was interested in learning more about these types of events and as I sketch on location and enjoy the process of capturing places (and people) from life it seemed like a good idea! Continue reading
Its always great to sketch in a new place, especially one with history and character, so when one of the Manchester Urban Sketching Group organized a trip to her home town-Kendal in Cumbria yesterday, I was keen to make the trip. It’s always great to see what you can capture of the place and to see a place with your own eyes after seeing it through other local sketchers eyes.Like a true urban sketcher, I love to travel and visit other places to draw so we set off early to get there in good time for our meet up at the Brewery Arts Centre. Continue reading
It’s nice to be beside the seaside and it was great to be sketching in Whitby on the East coast of the UK for a couple of days last week! As is usual for me trying to capture the places I visit- it’s about recording my visual diary, my ‘snapshots’ of the visit. They are not necessarily images that I create in 10 minutes but they are snapshots to the extent that they are the images that I think epitomize the place and its character. I chose to use a sketchbook (not very successfully as the 200 gsm Fabriano paper didn’t take watercolour well (perhaps it will prompt me to develop my line only and line with pencil work further!) and loose 300 gsm Bockingford watercolour paper. The sketchbook work tends to be more of a diary, perhaps thumbnail sketches, looser and with additional pieces added such as maps. Continue reading