What's Happening? Well . . .

Sorry. After the one sketch a day for a whole year challenge I've been sitting back on my laurels for a bit. Not that I haven't been doing anything at all. I've done a few sketches - I made a trip to Cardiff sketching a week or two ago, for instance. I've also made the odd sketch for Sketching Every Day - here's a couple of them: -

The second one was a challenge to make a self portrait based on the style of a favourite artist - being a natural show off I did 4. I pasted that self portrait sketch I made in March 4 times onto the same Word page, printed it off and sketched the additions over the top.

Since I finished my plough horses painting, though, I have made another couple of paintings in acrylic. First there was this one:-

basically my wife said, these horse paintings you've been doing are all well and good, but couldn't you do an old railway poster for me? We looked on Google images and she gave me a shortlist of three. This was my favourite, and it must have taken about 15 hours to make.

Then a little over a fortnight ago I started painting another 16x 20 in canvas in Artists Group and in my spare time. I was so taken with the plough horses painting which I made over Easter that I wanted to see if I could do a totally different large animal. They don't come much larger than an elephant, so this is what I decided to do. Here's the finished painting:-

I didn't keep a stop watch on it, but again, I'd reckon that this was about 15 hours from first putting pencil to canvas to signing my name.

Coming up though, from tomorrow it's June, and the 30x30 direct watercolour challenge for 2019 begins. I'm not committing myself in the same way that I did last year, but I'm certainly going to start it and see how far I can go with it. Watch this space.

Plough Horses Project

In my last post I mentioned the plough horse painting. I spent maybe 3 more hours on it yesterday. This is where I stopped on Saturday, the day I started sketching it onto the canvas board:-

Considering how long it took me to make the harness racing painting, this was quite an achievement for one day's work.

Here's where the painting is at the moment: -

I did a fair bit more work on the background before starting on the first horse. You can see the sparse foliage to the left has been painted in. I've also darkened some of the areas of bare soil. The most obvious difference though is the work I've done on the horse on the left. I'm delighted with the head, but not yet finished with the lower legs - that blue grey is just the base and will be painted over during the next session which, all things being equal, should be today.

Harness Racing Painting - finished

Sorry it's been a while. I've been without the internet for a week, so I just haven't been able to post. Still, it has at least allowed me to concentrate on finishing my latest acrylic. We left the painting here last time:-

You might recall that I was trying to do this painting 'properly' - that is, to not start painting in the horses until I'd finished the background . By this stage I'd go a nice effect with the trees, and found a green I could live with for the turf. So the next stage was to complete the horse in the foreground:-

I shan't lie to you, I do like painting horses very much. At first I wasn't sure that the colour combinations were quite right for this horse. but a combination of burnt ochre and burnt umber were actually pretty good. A little phalo blue added to my darkest raw umber gave me just what I was looking for for the shadows between the horse's forelegs. 

I do think that the horse which has been pretty much fully painted in by this photo is the most successful part of the whole painting. I used a similar combination of ochre and umber for the horse on the far right, although I went lighter just to distinguish it a little from the main horse. 

The horse to the immediate right of the main horse is a darker horse, and I'd started painting in one leg by this time, just to start to get an idea of the way that the different shades might interact with each other. However I did decide that I should probably paint in the jockey, the trap, and the horse and jockey on the extreme left before I concentrated on this horse.

The jockey is rather nicely painted, and he would come to stand out more once I painted in the darker horse behind him. The horse behind was darker anyway, and I thought that I would try to emphasise this. Looking at the next photograph I'm not entirely sure that this was the right way to go. Or rather, it is for the jockey in the foreground as it's very much brought out his head and upper body, but the horse behind is a but of a formless blob. Looking to the right you can see that I've applied a very watery base layer of a mixture of a little mars black, a little pthalo blue, a little china white and a lot of water.  

By the time I'd got this far the left hand side of the painting was pretty much completed. I'd done a little more work on the remaining horse, darkening some of the shadows on the rear leg. The idea when I was going to paint in the rest of the horse was to make it a mixture of blue-black, and dark browns as well. That was the idea, anyway.

Working left to right, I painted in the jockey and trap to the immediate right of the main horse. The dark horse to the right was going to prove to be a problem for me. Partly this was because of problems with the initial sketch. As I worked my way up the horse, applying paint to the head and neck, I came to realise that the head and neck were not proportioned correctly, so a lot of what I did before the next photograph was trying to correct this as best I could.

- and that's the finished painting. I did some more work trying to finesse the horse on the extreme right and extreme left, but that was it.

Acrylic Painting Project - Harness Racing

If you've read my previous two posts then you'll know that almost a fortnight ago I finished my last sketch to complete the one sketch a day challenge. One effect of this was that it has freed up my Wednesday evenings at art group. For the last few months I've been concentrating on making either plain ink or ink and watercolour sketches which I could complete in an evening to take care of that day's sketch. Now that I've done it, I decided that it was high time to start another acrylic painting.

What to paint, though? Well, thinking back over the last couple of years, when it comes to large acrylic paintings, my favourite subjects have been trams, trolleys and streetcars; steam locomotives and racehorses and working horses. Well, my last painting was a tram, and the one before that a steam engine. So it looked like another horse racing painting would fit the bill. This time, though, I decided to do something slightly different, by panting a harness racing subject.

Starting this one I promised myself that I was going to work patiently, by which I meant that I was going to sketch the design first onto the canvas, and not put one speck of paint down before this was finished. Then I was going to paint in the backgrounds, and then and only then was I going to allow myself to paint the bits I actually really enjoy - the horses and the jockeys.

So I spent all of Wednesday 27th's Artist's Group session in just sketching the design, and even then worked on it for another half hour last Saturday.

Taking so much time, the ironic thing is that if this was just a pencil sketch or an ink sketch of the same size I would have put a lot more detail and shading into it. The canvas is too big to be scanned, ad pencil on my canvases just doesn't photograph all that clearly, still hopefully it should give you the gist of what I've been doing.

Last Saturday, then, having completed the sketch I put down a layer of fairly strong yellow for the turf. This was always going to be painted over, but I was hoping that glimpses of the underlying yellow would come through in some areas. Then with the trees in the background I began applying dabs of light green , some of a slightly more watery consistency than the others. The idea was to paint in shadows and other colours of the leaves on top of this for the trees.

In this photo you can see the basic mottled effect in the top middle, while I've begun to paint in shadows and more variegation on the left hand side. I'd also begun to apply a mixture of olive green and titanium white on top of the yellow on the turf.

The above photo represents between 5 and 6 hours of work. I put in another hour's work before Wednesday completing the green layer on the turf. On the Wednesday I finished the trees in the background, and I wasn't at all unhappy with the effect. A judicious application of pthalo blue in some of the shadows and a watery application of burnt sienna in one area created the look I wanted, and drew some appreciative comments from other artists there. However, the other side of the coin was that my attempt to rectify the turf by adding a thin layer of creamy yellow to the top just made it far, far worse.

So on Thursday evening, I put in another hour and a half's work, applying layers of two slightly different lighter greens, one of which has a very appealing emerald tint. After about half an hour I started to think that this might actually work, and after another hour this morning I was a lot happier.

This one shows you the trees in the background now, and gives you a good idea about the different shades of green in the turf. I put in a bit more work on the turf, applying some subtle shadows and some scuff marks, and then, wonder of wonders, at least 10 hours after I began working on it, I finally started to paint a horse.

This is where I am currently. The neck and head of the horse in the foreground, which are mostly combined different shades of burnt umber and yellow ochre, which I've started painting still need some work, but it's a joy to do. I don't know if I'll get time to do anything more before Wednesday, but I'll post an update when I can.

One Sketch #188) Tram on Westminster Bridge

Am I happy with this?
You bet I am
What more could I possibly want
Than London, a bridge and a tram.

Sorry - couldn't resist. (Not bad though, is it? Acrylic paint heavily watered down and used like water colour on watercolour paper.

One Sketch #160) Fred Calleri

There was a young lady called Kate
Who went for a drink with a mate
When offered a gin
She said, "It's a sin
A milk shake? Now that would be great!"

This was a response to the Sketching Every Day challenge to produce a picture influenced by the work of Fred Calleri. Well, this isn't so much inspired by as a very inferior copy. Never mind, it's the second acrylic painting this week, and doing something like this just reminds me how much I love painting in acrylic.

One Sketch #157 Fortune Teller

Who resists the siren call
Of tarot cards
And crystal ball
Look into her eyes, you fool
She tells you nothing
But conceals all.

Now, when I think of the word sketch I tend to think of a drawing, made in pencil, pen or charcoal, for instance. But you can sketch in many other media, acrylic paint included, and so that's why I felt justified in calling this response to a Sketching Every Day prompt a sketch. It's weeks since I last used acrylic paints, and I thoroughly enjoyed executing this one. For me, it was a lightning fast job, taking about 90 inutes

One Sketch #125) Ferris Wheel

Life is a like a Ferris Wheel

Ups and downs

And going round and round in circles.

This is the biggest sketch I've done in this one sketch challenge. It's in acrylic, on a 16x20 inch canvas board. It's a not very interesting story - basically my wife wanted this design on a large canvas board to put up in the bathroom. I'll be honest, I'm not totally in love with it, but if she likes it then the time I put into it, the canvas board and the black paint are a cheap price to pay. 

I did take some photos as I was making this in my studio. I began in pencil:-

It's not a great photo, but at least you can see the two elipses I started with. 

 At this stage the wheel is beginning to emerge:-

And this is the pencil sketch finished. I'll be honest, I rather wish I'd just gone over the pencil lines in ink, as I do thin that this is more effective than the finished painting. Well, never mind. The client - my wife - likes it so that'll do. 

One Sketch #105) St. John's Church, Cardiff - South Wakes Urban Sketchers Monthly Sketch Crawl

No Gothic revival this
It never went away.
And as it nears its millennium
Still it looks down
and down
And sees
All is well.

Yes, today was the July sketchcrawl of the South Wales Urban Sketchers chapter - Cardiff again, but this time a Sunday rather than a Saturday. This time we each of us stayed outdoors, in and around the Hayes area. This is the only direct watercolour I made, but I did make some ink sketches - here they are: -

 This is a bear from Cardiff Castle's famous animal wall. I enjoyed sketching it, and wanted to do more, but I was standing up and the sun was beating down on my bald spot.

 I broke the habit of a lifetime, and asked this chap if he didn't mind me sketching him. He couldn't really refuse - I'd just put some money in his bag. Very good he was too - a selection of Dire Straits' hits, which always goes down well with me.

 The Hayes Island snack bar.

The Old library - our meeting place. It contains shops, and a museum, and a café, which was closed, so we had our post morten session alfresco today.

One Sketch #54) Horsey

Racing is a business first
We know that's true, of course
Forgive me if I have to ask-
What's in it for the horse?

In the last 18 months or so I've painted and sold several pictures of racehorses, so, stuck for inspiration I went back to my old faithful subject. Here's some of the paintings made in the last year or so: -

The Home Straight

Racing from Newmarket

Over the Sticks

Frankel