Portrait of Tayla

Another drawing I forgot to load last time - my daughter Tayla again, this time in charcoal and some red chalk on A4 Arches HP paper.

Work from the last few months

This is one of the photos I have been taking recently and playing around with on photoshop elements. Once I am off this loan laptop and get access to all the other photos, I will add more. I've been enjoying taking flower photos.

Here is Ngatahi in all its glory. It is 1.3m x 1.3m and was the 2009 collaborative project for the NZ Art Guild. I was heavily involved at all stage including sourcing the timber, drawing up the original design. My husband assisted with the cutting up of all the pieces and he built the frame. Each piece was individually painted with the blue and green before sending it out to artists across NZ. I helped with all of that and with the packing up of all the packages and instructions for the artists. I was also responsible for photographing each individual piece as prints were offered of the individual artworks. I also glued down each individual piece onto the black frame and assisted with transporting it around Auckland for photographing and hanging. Huge amount of work was involved with this.

Here are four of my resin pieces hanging at the annual NZ Art Guild exhibition. The 3 small pieces all sold on opening night which was great.

Here is a close up of the larger piece, however the turquoise does not photograph well and looks quite different in person.

Here is a charcoal and white chalk sketch I did of my friend's son Ryan. It is A3 size.

This is a drawing I did using Derwent tinted charcoal. I plan on painting her one day. I took a series of photographs of these beautiful headstone angels.

More photos to come once I have my laptop back....................

Tayla's portrait completed

Here is the completed portrait of my daughter Tayla - not the best photo but will try and get a better one at some point. This is 300 x 300 x 40mm oil on canvas.

WIP2 - figure painting

Here is more progress on my figure painting - a long long way to go but I am enjoying the process of slowly building up the figure so not sure how she will turn out but thinking about some symbolism to include in this as I do have a degree with a double major in History and Feminist Studies so I think it would be good to create a story for this one.

wip - my first figure

I have started work on my first figure based on one of my drawings from the life drawing workshop I attended in March. Long way to go and I had to hunt and buy a image from a life drawing website off a similar position so I can get the hand right since I didn't draw that with any details at the time. Enjoying this and I keep changing my mind about how I want the background to look so I am guessing this will look majorly different in a few weeks time.

resin galore

Here are some of the resin mixed media pieces I am preparing for Cafe Apollo where I display my art. Very hard to take photos of these and the turquoise ones just really don't come out but hopefully these photos give you a bit of an idea.

They are lots of fun to do and I am using mainly acrylic inks now for the glazes which are yummy yummy yummy to use.

I have also started some resin experiments which involve painting with ink on layers of resin so once I get a little further with that, I'll upload some photos.

Ngatahi - NZ Art Guild collaborative project 2009

Each year the NZ Art Guild does a collaborative project in which a whole pile of artists (62 this year) each do a tile which is then put together for one large piece. See this link for the one we did last year called Reach Out. Last year and this year, the proceeds from the auction of the artwork, goes to the Mental Health Foundation and last year they used the image of Reach Out for all their posters for Mental Health Week in October.

Because I am one of the organisers of this project along with Sophia Elise who manages the guild, both her and I each did 2 tiles this year to make up the 64 pieces we needed for the final image. These are my two pieces. Each one is approx 150 x 150mm.

My husband (who very handily is a builder) gets roped in each year to help with the practical stuff including the building off the frame which I have been painting and preparing today so that tonight all 64 pieces can be glued in. Here you can see how big it is - I think it is approximately 1.2 x 1.2m but I haven't done the final measurement yet.

This year the piece which is entitled Ngatahi, will be auctioned off on the night of the opening of the Art Guild annual exhibition at the Bruce Mason Centre in Takapuna. The image of the artwork will go out this week in press releases which is different from past years when we unveiled on the night and then auctioned off on Trade Me.

I've spent lots of hours on this over the past few months as you can imagine preparing the image on the board, cutting it up, painting on the base colours and mailing these out to everyone. It's a lot of work but the result always looks fantastic and the MHF are so pleased to be working with us on this and it is a fantastic charity to support this way.

Tayla's oil portrait wip

Here are the work in progress photos from Tayla's portrait. I am not too far away from finishing this and I reckon one more good session will get it done. It needs quite a bit of refining and the values aren't quite right yet but I am keen to get stuck in and get it finished to be hung with Carter's portrait.

I found the reference photo more difficult to work from than the reference photo I used for Carter because the lighting wasn't so good and it didn't have a really clear light source which I think makes for a better portrait. But I'll play around some more and get this finished and see how it goes.

Oil portrait - Carter

I finally finished this portrait of my son Carter. I started this with the grisaille underpainting back in December but left it for a few months. Over the past week I have had a couple of good sessions with this and can now declare it is finished!

The initial grisaille with burnt umber and solvent.

The initial transparent glazes.

This is when I started with more opaque pigment in the glazes and got the ghostly look.

Got stuck back into it. Had to stop at this point as the background was wet and I started to pick up the green and blue when I was doing his hair and I though green hair wasn't a great loo.

I am really happy with this. It went through some really ugly phases and I had reached a point where I was scared to continue because I had invested so much time in it up until that point and I was concerned with stuffing it up. Then I had a night last week when I just wanted to paint and I didn't even think about it not working and it flowed.

WIP - carbon pencil

Here is another drawing that I did on Saturday night which kept me entertained while half watching a DVD. I still need to refine areas but will leave it for a few days before going back to it to get some distance. I only used carbon pencils for this.

Couple of carbon pencil portraits

Here are two carbon pencil drawings on A4 HP Arches I did back in February for my Mum's birthday. I really struggled getting decent scans or photos as lighting wasn't great and I only had one shot as I had to get them posted.

Tranquility - the last resin piece

Here is the fourth larger resin piece I did for the Mercure. I have about 6 or 7 small pieces on the boil too at the moment which I will use to replace current work at Cafe Apollo, but they are still in varying stages of completion. This one is the feeling of the sea at the end of the day with the glowing sky. This one is 700 x 550 x 40mm.

Icy Morning - another resin piece

This is one of the four resin mixed media pieces that I completed last week and hung at the Mercure Windsor Hotel yesterday. It is 600 x 475 x 40mm in size and has a collaged base with various textured papers, then multitudes of glazes and then silver leaf rubbed in and then resined. I then drop more silver left in when the resin is first applied so it is suspended in it.

This particular painting is my expression of an icy crisp clear winter's morning in Christchurch. Though I have lived in Auckland for almost a decade, I will stay a CHCH girl at heart and I do love the crispiness of those frosty winter days and prefer them to the wetter warmer winter we experience in Auckland.

Life Drawing Saturday Workshop

Yesterday I attended a full day Life Drawing workshop. I enjoyed components of it and got frustrated with other parts. The model herself was excellent and did some excellent poses and while I enjoyed the exercises to loosen up, I was hoping for more longer poses in the afternoon as planned so that I could get stuck in, however the class wasn't that well structured and things that were supposed to be covered and to happen just didn't. So while I found it worthwhile overall, I did feel somewhat frustrated at the end of the day and that I didn't get the chance to really get stuck in.

I also like to blend with my finger, it is what I do naturally and I like the effect. However the tutor didn't like using fingers to blend and didn't in her personal style so I felt like I was getting told off when I did use my fingers. I appreciate learning from people who have their own techniques and styles and you can learn something different from each teacher, however I found it frustrating that if we used a technique that we liked that she didn't then pretty much we were told to wipe the pigment across the page and start again. That is one of the reasons I felt I came out with a whole lot of part-finished drawings that I would have got a chance to complete had I not be told to start something different half way through the post.

The tutor also liked the figure to touch at least 3 sides of the page so that it was cropped each time. I spent so long last year with the TLC DVD exercises getting to the point where I could fit the person on the page, so it was interesting to have a different point of view. And in fact the top drawing with the whole figure, I was told half way through to stop and only do a cropped part bigger, but in that case I said I would just keep going with what I was doing as there was 10 minutes left of class and once again I would have been left with a couple of partly completed drawings. Even then I didn't get it done and I might develop it further in a different format.

We did heaps of these exercises, when we had to keep the charcoal on the page and the model would move every 5 seconds. They were fun.

Here is another one that I started after being told to stop the previous one which had the whole body on the paper. So ended up having less than 10 minutes to work on this so didn't get far at all.

So overall, I wouldn't be interested in attending another workshop with that particular tutor which is disappointing as her work is fantastic and I did learn some things from her. Unfortunately though I felt that we were being directed to work in the styles and techniques she liked rather than being encouraged to develop our own styles. It was frustrating when you spend 20 minutes drawing a pose that you actually quite like and then the tutor grabs a piece of handtowel and wipes it all across the page. That is the first time I have been dissatisfied following an art workshop and my frustrations in the end were more dominant than the parts that I enjoyed.

More resin and this time RED!

I have been working on more resin pieces and this is one that I finished yesterday. I am not sure of the title yet but the size is 600 x 450 x 40mm. I have been doing a lot of thinking about what I love about these resin pieces and the thing I come down to the most is that for me they are tactile, I want to touch them and I do. Everytime I walk past one on the wall I reach out and touch it. Perhaps it is because the resin is protective and I can't damage it by touching it. Whereas I have some artworks on my wall at the moment that I am storing for a friend and they are incredible and I would be too scared to touch and in fact have no inclination to do so, because I would be scared of damaging them. And even if I owned them I would feel the same.

I am still finding it very hard to take a proper photo of these pieces and they are so much more in real life and the colours just glow. I ended up using a flash (which you can see in the photo reflecting) but without it the glaze layes just aren't showing up.

Connor - coloured pencil portrait wip

I thought that I would load the most recent update of Connor's portrait. I haven't had a chance to do anything on this for a few days now but hope one or two more decent sessions will finish it.

I have been working on 3 more resin pieces but stuffed up one completely in my experimenting of dropping acrylic paint into the wet resin. The effect is great except for the wrong colour went over the wrong area when the resin smoothed out and when I tried to fix it I made it worse. So that one is heading for the bin. Just as well it was a small one as I was using that to experiment on before I resin the large one.

Charcoal and white chalk portrait and oil seascape

I realises today that I hadn't added these to this blog. This top one is called "Twilight Dreaming" and is oil on canvas 600 x 300 x 40mm painted around the sides.

And this is a portrait of my step-son drawn from a photo I took last year that I loved. It actually looks heaps better in real life as the photo didn't capture some of the more subtle tone changes you see in real life. This is on A3 Mi-Teints and I used compressed charcoal and white conte chalk.

Visual Diary ideas

I thought that I would post one of the pages in my visual diary to show the ideas I am coming up with in regards to these abstracted landscapes and seascapes. I have three that I am nearly finished with that I just need to add the embedded objects and resin but here are some other ideas I have been playing with.

I find watercolour pencils a great way to play around with colour ideas as these are all about colour and jewel-like colours with texture and glossiness.

I have been thinking about a place I have been at a certain time and then reducing that down to the colours that I feel when I think about it and how that could translate.

I'm really enjoying these and it is a nice break from oils (which I perhaps use a bit more seriously). For some reason I feel that I can play more with acrylics and I wouldn't know why. It could be that acrylics are easy to paint over and start again if it doesn't work and in fact most of these canvases that I am using are pre-used acrylic paintings that I never finished or was unhappy with that I have covered and textured and it feels great to re-use them.

I am making good progress with the coloured pencil portrait of my Labrador and am over half way through. It is a long long process with coloured pencils but I actually find it quite meditative to do that detailed work that takes hours and hours and hours. I normally don't watch TV but we are watching LOST on DVD at the moment so this keeps me busy while watching as I find it hard to sit and watch without something to do other than watching the TV.

The little triptych and start of portrait

Here is the completed triptych once again inspired by the sea. The canvases (6"x6") were collaged with textured papers and then gesso'd and then glazed with acrylic paint and glazing medium, interference gel and acrylic ink. I used gold leaf in these as well.

Unfortunately you get the glare of the resin in these photos but they are the best I can get to show the textures.

I am really really enjoying these and have another 3 on the go. I will also post a picture of the concepts I am coming up with in my sketchbook. I am really excited about doing a series of these as I am having so much fun with them and it is such a nice break from the more detailed work I do with oil.

And here is the start of a coloured pencil portrait I have started of my lovely black lab. These take forever and this is almost life size so it may be a few weeks to complete it. This is on Stonehenge paper and I am using a mixture of pencils to do it, so Prismacolor, Lyra, Derwent Coloursoft and Caran D'Arch. The last portrait I did of Connor was on Art Spectrum Colourfix paper which eats pencils because of the sanded surface. I think it is marginally quicker on Stonehenge and I am pretty pleased with the amount of layering it is letting me do. I subscribe to a number of blogs from Coloured Pencil Artists in the UK and USA and Stonehenge does seem to be a recommended support for this type of work.

Better photo of the resin piece

Here are some marginally better photos of the resin piece I did the other day. I am thinking of a series of resined landscapes and seascapes so I think I may write that up as one of my briefs.

By the way the piece is 500 x 300 x 40mm.

Some photos from the Shave an Artist and Life Exhibition

On Tuesday night we had the opening night of the LIFE exhibition at the Bruce Mason Centre which also involved Shave an Artist and an art auction to raise money for the Leukemia and Blood Foundation. My painting 'Escape' is in that exhibition for the next month and it was the NZ Art Guild that put on this event.

I am a moderator with the art guild and help out with the exhibitions and collaborative projects etc so for this one, I helped on with the hanging of the exhibition on Monday, and was an auction spotter on the night itself.

Over $20,000 was raised between the 13 people getting their heaps shaved and the 13 artworks auctioned off so it was a fantastic night.

These are just a few of my favourite photos from the night. Unfortunately I had to grab my camera in breaks between auctions so I didn't get as many photos as I would have liked. But what a fantastic cause to be involved with and this is one of the reasons why I get so much out of my work with the NZ Art Guild, when I can be involved with such fantastic events that help worthy causes.