Some new paintings
A couple weeks ago, everyone else in our house came down with Covid. We didn't suffer too badly, it was more like the flu, but I wasn't able to focus on my regular work. But I wasn't sick enough to stay in bed, either, so I did some freestyle painting on big pieces of drawing board, without having to worry about how it came out. Here was the first painting, very much influenced by what's going on in the Ukraine:
I liked the colour palette and stuck with it for the second picture:
...And kept going on the cat theme. (I'm studying Ukrainian right now and one of the recurring phrases in DuoLingo is 'Home is where the cat is'/ Дім там, де кіт).
My studiomate, Philip Reeve, is in the middle of getting together things to make an Arthurian-themed film, and I might be painting a shield or two, so I tried out a shield shape. Here's the work-in-progress:
And final painting:
Even though I was starting to get better by this point, this next painting really eluded me. I wanted it to be a bit more Dartmoor-influenced, and tried to tackle these cool bendy oak trees we see on our walks. But with the colours and Dartmoor ponies thrown in, it all started to look garish, and more awful the more ways I tried to fix it. So I got a pot of purple and started to paint it out, to reuse the board. The first coat of paint was pretty transparent, and I suddenly realised I liked the picture much better with the dark coat over the top of it, and it gave it lots of interesting textures. So I painted in some stars, and decided it was worth keeping.
In the meantime, I'm trying to work on my Ukrainian penmanship. The DuoLingo app is good for some things, but the phrases seem to stick better in my head when I write them down by hand instead of simply pushing phone buttons.
I liked the colour palette and stuck with it for the second picture:
...And kept going on the cat theme. (I'm studying Ukrainian right now and one of the recurring phrases in DuoLingo is 'Home is where the cat is'/ Дім там, де кіт).
My studiomate, Philip Reeve, is in the middle of getting together things to make an Arthurian-themed film, and I might be painting a shield or two, so I tried out a shield shape. Here's the work-in-progress:
And final painting:
Even though I was starting to get better by this point, this next painting really eluded me. I wanted it to be a bit more Dartmoor-influenced, and tried to tackle these cool bendy oak trees we see on our walks. But with the colours and Dartmoor ponies thrown in, it all started to look garish, and more awful the more ways I tried to fix it. So I got a pot of purple and started to paint it out, to reuse the board. The first coat of paint was pretty transparent, and I suddenly realised I liked the picture much better with the dark coat over the top of it, and it gave it lots of interesting textures. So I painted in some stars, and decided it was worth keeping.
In the meantime, I'm trying to work on my Ukrainian penmanship. The DuoLingo app is good for some things, but the phrases seem to stick better in my head when I write them down by hand instead of simply pushing phone buttons.