Double/Triple Pears - Finished

Here are the finished Floating Pear paintings. I’ve reworked the stone shelves and glazed the pears, adding in a little more shading than the original single pears, so these ones pop out from the canvas more. It’s amazing how you start seeing different relationships between the pears in these multiple ones, they seem to have taken on a life of their own :)

Double/Triple Pears – First colour pass

I did a first colour pass on the pears last week, haven’t had a chance to blog until now. They’ll need a little tweaking here and there before they’re ready for glazing, but all in all they’re coming along nicely :)

Single Pears all finished

Pear Floating Above Stone Shelf…numbers 1, 2 and 3… I know you’ve seen lots of these, but I thought I’d post the finished versions of them all anyway :)

A Pears Progress…

A busy day today (actually, yesterday now…), I decided to do a little more work on the three single pears, just a couple of hours building up the colours further and adding some highlights, I want them to have a jewel like quality so I think this was time well spent…followed that with some work on a drawing I’m doing for a Christmas present (So you’ll have to wait to see that blogged)…Then moved onto the double/triple pears, added some initial modelling to the pears themselves and then started painting the shelves…2 meters of stone shelf edge takes a while to paint lol…

Three single pears

Second job of the day was the main painting on these single pear paintings…the bachelors of the pear world to follow the comments of the previous post ;)…all looking nice and glowing now. I’ll add a few highlights to the front of the shelf and then glaze the pears once they’ve dried.

Drawing up next set of pears

First painting job of the day done, I’ve finished drawing up the next set of pear paintings…onto the next stage of the single pears now…:)

Pears everywhere...

Well not quite the constant stream of posts I’d planned on today, took me a while to get starting and once things were finally progressing, I didn’t want to keep stopping to blog…so I just got on and painted…which is what I should be doing anyway :)

Started by glazing the original ‘pear on shelf painting’, you can’t really tell from this photo, but it’s got a lot more depth and life in the pear now, only took 10 minutes to do, but it’s really made a difference.

Then moved onto the three floating pears, did the underpainting on the pears as I developed the stone shelves then I’ve gazed a little colour over the pears to create the shadow colours (hence the pears look very dark here). Will let that dry over night and then start building up the forms and highlights properly.

I really like the floating element in these, it feels like they’re developing a very magical ingredient. :) Anyway, enough rabbiting on, off to do some work on the linocut.

Floating Pears - 3 paintings - Drawing stage

A variety of odd jobs to do today, the first of which was getting these ‘Floating Pears’ drawn up on canvases. They’re intended to all be individual pieces, but I’ve composed them so they work as a triptych as well…seemed like a good idea at the time.

Also, my Linocut ‘Floating’ (the couple in the boat) got into the Little Xmas Art Competition. You can see all the shortlisted artists on the OXART website. Sue Cook, Sue Templeman and Jane Tomlinson also got through the first round, so the Eynsham Art Group is very well represented. Good luck to all :)

Still Life Day - 4:00pm

One Pear on a Stone Shelf.

Okay I’m done on this for today. I may do a bit of glazing work on it in a week or so, once it’s dried a little…then again I may just leave it as it is…need to live with it for a day or two :)

I’d hoped the combination of bare canvas, exposed drawing and a bit of detailed work would give me something interesting and I think it has. With all the still live work I’ve done I’ve been trying to find a balance between the traditional and contemporary, this one feels like a good step :)

Still Life Day - 2:00pm

Some colour into the pear and more detail in the front of the stone shelf…

Still Life Day - 11:40am

A couple of hours in and the drawing is all done, just starting to apply the darker shadow tones. I’m planning on leaving lots of this stage of the painting just as it is now, working into the stone shelf a little and refining the pear a lot more. But the background will be bare canvas as it is here and I’ll leave the drawing lines in place where possible…

Still Life Day - 9:45am

Am doing a little experiment with still life today, want to see how far I can get in a single day…9:45 now, so enough blogging on with the painting…will post though the day as things progress…or not as the case may be :)

Three Fennel on Stone

Finally finished the Fennel…I want to get back into using oil for a few paintings next year, so thought I’d get a bit of practice on this…it’s been ages since I used oil and the first couple of hours were…interesting…:)

I know a few of you find this one VERY boring, but I think it’s been a very useful exercise…I’ve been focusing on the swirly watercolours this year, so this kind of tight accurate(ish) oil is a big contrast…much more like the work I was doing before the swirls…somewhere in the back of my mind is the feeling that I can somehow fuse the two…I’m not quite sure how yet…but that will form part of what I do in 2009…:)

Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year…Hope Santa brings you all you desire…X

Fennel part 3

Doing some more work on the Fennel still life today, starting to add in more detail…needs to dry a little now before I start putting the main shading on the bulbs themselves. Am reasonably pleased with it so far. Hopefully the next phase will really start to bring it to life…

Today I’ve mostly been listening to Shipbuilding by Elvis Costello, while being annoyed by the lack of framerate on the webcam and enjoying the snow falling outside the window…Hope you’ve all managed to find a couple of nice moments in your day too :)

First pass work in progress...

Well the live video appears to work, some you’ll be able to see just how SLOWLY I work…;) This is the painting I’m working on, I took this with the webcam, it not a great image, I’ll take one with a proper camera soon. Anyway things are progressing; I’ve got the first pass of the stone in and am starting to block in the fennel bulbs. I’m trying to keep the tones fairly muted at this stage, to keep the painting as calm and subtle as possible…once this first painting pass is done I’ll work into the highlights and shadows and hopefully that’ll leave me with a nice looking still life that’s not quite as ‘in your face’ as some of the ones I’ve done in the past :)

Frida on Fennel

I’m trying my hand at a new still life this week, three fennel bulbs on a stone shelf.

I’ve been looking at the work of Henk Helmantel and Andrew Hemingway, who are both masters of the genre and I fancied seeing if I could get anywhere close to what they can achieve…clearly I’m feeling overly cocky today :)…

I’ve been pushing the watercolours in an abstract direction, so fancied trying something ultra realistic for a change of pace and also wanted to play around with the oils again before getting back to the Jack in the Bath portrait…and I can’t help noticing that realistic still life work is… a: popular in galleries and b: fetches pretty good prices…So worth some further experiments I think…

Anyway we’ll see how it progresses…as you can see I have Frida watching over me in the studio…what an inspiring woman, I’m hoping some of her drive and determination will rub off on me…and it gives me someone to talk to while I’m painting :)

Rose on pillow

Had a day off work today and thought I'd spend a few hours on another Freud(ish) experiment...Having been SO impressed at the speed with which Sue is producing her artweeks work, i thought I'd have ago at painting something in one sitting and here it is. The picture is only 6" x 8", I've TRIED not to overwork it too much, I think the pillowcase stayed nice and painterly, I used a fair large bush, which helped...The rose petals work nicely, just smeared paint :) The leaves I'm a bit unsure about, there were certainly a few points in the process where they were becoming overworked...hopefully I've managed to pull it back. Need to hide it away for a few days before looking at it again, to know for sure...Anyway, I had a very enjoyable time working on it :)

Apples...

Did a bit of work on the still life this afternoon...spent AGES trying to get the apples right...Quite happy with the ones at the bottom of the picture, so starting to work into the chard leaves now.

Also played around with the portraits of Neil, Steve and Ant last night. I think I might have got them all working as one image again. Plus came up with some surreal elements to pull things together and add more interest...I'll try and get a bit more work done on that this week and see if I can get a sketch posted....Off for beer now :)

Finest Green...

Spent a few hours on the still life for Artweeks...need to get this finished in the next couple of weeks to give it time to dry, so need to knuckle down next week and get some work done :) Also need to get the Farmoor watercolour done in a similar time frame, so I can get it framed...So expect a few updates to the blog next week ;)

I've just been blocking in the green leaves today...a bit time consuming as the curly chard leaves are quite complex, but it's coming along :)

More orange and grey...

Did a bit of work on the still life this afternoon, I want to push the brushwork a bit further in this picture. I have to resist the temptation to blend everything in...Anyway, both pictures are in a rough state at the moment, but I promise to get some colour into at least one of them this week...:)