Skip to main content

A Study in Blue

A great day playing wet media and big paint brushes... Just what I needed to back into a creative head space.  We were asked to bring a object in to draw, drawing from photographs is never quite the same.  I figured it would be a good idea to take something that was relevant to my brief of interesting creatures so I took in a wooden puppet dragon, something I picked up in Vietnam. 


Again in keeping with my concept of translating the traditional into contemporary design I decided to stick with a blue study and spent all day mixing various shades and tones of blue ink and procien dyes to paint large dragons with.

this is on lining paper and all the inks bled a lot making it blurry
I had very mixed results, getting used to wielding a paint brush again was fun, working on a larger scale then I am used to is quite challenging and puts me out of my comfort zone.  I decided to work on different surfaces to see how the wet media worked and it was an interesting experiment.  I painted on wood, MDF, corrugated card board, ordinary paper, lining paper and some nice water colour paper... it wasn't surprising that I got the best results on the water colour paper but some of the others were interesting.  For me this is a messy process and when I relax quite enjoyable - it will never be my chosen media but it produces some good shapes and lots to work with once scanned into PhotoShop


This was the one I liked best especially when I had worked it up a little using a sheet of acetate place on top and then adding detail with a fine liner and a gold promarker pen.  Looking forward to scanning in - tidying it up and playing further.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Almost last chapter... In which our Go Stargazing team watch Astonishing Aurora Borealis seen from the deck of the Astonishing Borealis!!!

The weather brightened considerably and the snowy peaks lining our sail down the fjiords  looked glorious and sparkly in the sunshine against a (mainly) blue sky back drop.   More awesome scenary.... the Go Stargazing team wrapt up their lectures ... only searching for the illusive Northern Lights remained.  The tension from the night before dissolved in the sunshine the forecast for Aurora borealis was looking fairly positive - it was the captains farewell cocktsil party so everyone had their gladrags on.. We ate dinner and sky remained clear so we headed back to our room and donned as many layers as we could move in and proceeded to deck 10 in anticipation of stars and northern lights..... it did not dissappiont - just we got there as the bridge announced that the lights could be seen on the starboard side of the ship. It was stunning. Slowly the intensity built. The auroral green became brighter and bigger areas appe...

Vigo

We left the ship to explore Vigo. Its a much larger place then we expected... although tbh I hadn't given ut a lot of thought. Its a real mish mash of old and new and having got a map from tourist info we decided to follow the walking trail to the Monte Castro... the highest point of the town.  Most of the town was pretty much as everywhere else... lots of traffic... lots of people... one or two interesting buildings and a lot of shopping. We headed to the art gallery - this has been a year of gallery visits so we we seen o reason to change now.  The Museo de Marco is housed in the towns ex prison building and its very grand. In fact, I think that on this occaision the building might have been more interesting than the art....  Although the visiting exhibition by Susanne S D Themlitz was strangely compelling. It was a huge varied collection of eclectic items... found, salavaged, manipulated and arranged in lots of ways - weirdly inspiring - and mostly enjoyable to look at...

verdant lushness

Its a never ending island hop... today we hopped of the boat at Kingstown, on the island St. Vincents and Grenadine. Once through the usual port duty free - cheap booze and diamonds to go milarkey we were straight into the town... crazy noisy smelly chaos... refreshingly no tat shops for tourists, just local markets and street traders all vying for local sales.  Music blasting from everywhere, cars (very battered and often very pimped) all over the roads - parked in the middle of the street, loading, unloading, chatting seemingly oblivious to the total traffic jam caused behind them...  We walked through this mayhem - the temperatures were rising probably about 30 degrees - tourists evident by trying to walk on the shady side of the street - even when we turned off the main drag and there were less people it was still like carnival time with music blasting everywhere. Its very atmospheric and mostly promotes a good vibe although I have heard '3 little birds' everywhich way a...