#30x30DrectWatercolor2019 paintings 4-9

Here we are then: -

4) Horse racing - They're Off. I painted this at Artists' group on Wednesday. Sadly we've gone down to once a fortnight, but at least you can do a decent watercolor like this in about 90 minutes, unlike my acrylic 15 hour marathons. Not a fan of horse racing at all, if I'm totally honest with you, but I just love painting horse racing scenes, be it in acrylic or watercolor.

5) Port Talbot Docks. The scan has not picked out all of the colors, since I went very watery with this. Hence the ship looking as if it has a half white hull - the white part is actually a light rust red which for some reason just has not been picked up.

6) Rafael Nadal. This was inspired by the continuing French Open tennis, when earlier this week Rafa rolled back the years and easily dismissed Roger Federer.

7) Colin Baker as the 6th Doctor. Saturday 8th June was Colin Baker's birthday. I always felt that Colin got a very rough deal as the Doctor. Put simply, most of the scripts he was given weren't really good enough, and there's precious little that any actor can do about that.

8) D-Day Landing. Last week was the 75th anniversary of D Day. I was fortunate enough o accompany a party of school children to Normandy in 1994, which was the 50th anniversary of D Day.

9) Statue of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. I'm pretty pleased with this. Last year I loved the painting I made of one of Landseer's bronze lions in Trafalgar Square, so this year I decided I'd do another iconic London statue.

30x30 Direct Watercolour - numbers 2 and 3

Number 2 - The Evening gnus

Number 3 - Blue Brando

#30x30DirectWatercolor Challenge - 1) Rock Lobster

Okay, if you were around last year you may recall I participated in the 30x30 watercolour challenge in June. I've embarked upon it again - it's a day late, granted, but there we are. This cute lobster took about 30 minutes. Why a lobster - well, it helped fulfil the prompt on Sketching Every Day today. Y'ere 'tis

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.

- And relax . . .

Yes, the plough horse painting is finished. Here it is:-

Well happy.

Racehorse pencil sketch

Been a while since I made a graphite sketch. I was taking a break from the plough horse painting and it struck me that I've made several larger acrylic paintings of horses, and one ink sketch during the challenge, but I've never done one in pencil. So I got my cheap small sketchbook, and an ordinary HB pencil and I made this sketch :-

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 359 (Tuesday 19th March) Wolf

Don't expect me
To domesticate
Any time soon
Keep your pampered pooches
While I howl
At the moon.

No idea what prompted this, but suddenly had a feeling that I wanted to sketch a wolf howling, so here it is.

One Sketch 352) Coral Reef

My only beef
With life on a reef
Is huge great sharks
With razor teeth.

Yes, another Sketching Every Day prompt - and it would probably have been better to go with vivid colour - but sorry, pushed for time and lacking energy. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

One Sketch 343) Marine Iguana

My blood runs cold
Even when I bask on
the banks of
frozen fire.
But I can still move
Torpedo sharp
Through the colder depths
Of the sea
Until, triumphant
I explode onto the rocks
To warm.

The prompt on Sketching Every Day today was reptile. Now, I'm not really keeping count, but I'm pretty sure I've already done two reptiles since I started one sketch a day, those being the Komodo dragon (my favourite reptile) and a crocodile. So, not wanting to repeat myself I picked this, my second favourite reptile, the Galapagos marine iguana.

I first saw marine iguanas on a David Attenborough documentary. The Galapagos islands are one of those places I will probably never visit, but I'd love to - I'm very fond of Giant Tortoises as well.

I think It's probably about time to start counting down in days now, and so here we go - 22 days to go.

One Sketch 342 (Saturday 2nd March) Fruit Crate Label

Telling a tale of
sweet fruits
of warm places
And days long gone

The prompt on Saturday for Sketching Every Day was fruit crate art. I have to be honest, I just couldn't get my backside into gear. My plan was to make this one - it's a copy of a label I found on the net - and then paint it in watercolour. But you know how it is, I started late and by the time I'd sketched it I told myself that it qualified as the day's sketch already - which it did, and I just couldn't find the oomph to take it upstairs to the studio and paint it. Sorry, but I'm not going to lie to you. There it is.

One Sketch 336 - Featured Artist Erik Abel

This one I'm quite prepared to share
My copy
Of a multicoloured bear.

Know nothing about Erik Abel, but he was today's featured artist om Sketching Every Day, and so I found the original f this which I copied, after a fashion.

Tomorrow in the early hours I' off to Stockholm for a few days, so don't be surprised if the next few sketches turn out to have a distinctly Scandinavian flavour.

One Sketch 333) Hippo

Whenever I've been with a hippo
He's never afraid to let rippo
Each gigantic fart
Is only the start
-Be wary of giving him lippo.

That's terrible. Why a hippo today? No idea, other than some days you just know are going to turn out to be hippo days - no point resisting it.

One Sketch 309) (Monday 28th) Carry Akroyd

The fox is always near
Lurking in the long grass, tall grass
Short grass
The fox is always near.
So the hare listens
To the song of the wind
And the song of the scent
For the fox is always near
Yet the hare
Fills his lungs and his heart
And his tune fills the long grass,
Tall grass, short grass
For he has jumped over the moon
And the fox was nowhere near.

Sorry, don't know what that was all about. Yesterday's prompt from Sketching Every Day  was the artist Carry Akroyd. I really liked the original of this, which has the quality of a wood cut. Muggins here did it with ink pen on white paper. Would have been a lot easier to use some kind of white medium on black paper. D'oh.

One sketch 303) Rhinoceros

It is a beast
I have to say
Of quite exalted rank
It has my admiration
Half animal,
Half tank.

No idea what else to sketch today, so decided on this rhino - shall we call him Neil. Badoom boom ching - I'm here all week, ladies and gents.

One Sketch 284) The Secret Life of Butterflies Zine

The Secret Life of Butterflies

Each is a MASTER of disguise

each is a Ninja Glider

and loves to drink rough CIDER

They love to go to Discos

and fly to San Francisco

They knock on People's doors

- and when they sleep, they SNORES!

Basically, if you fold a piece of paper into 8, and cut it in the right place, you get a wee booklet of 8 pages which we can call a zine - from magazine, I'm guessing. I didn't come up with the idea. The nonsense rhyme on it, and the pictures, now, they're mine. I've loved butterflies since my youngest children were very little - about 20 years now - and so this was what occurred to me. The butterfly in the pages is based on the Peacock (Inachis Io) which is my favourite species.

One Sketch 276) (Weds 26th December) Ledger Art

Big chief sits so silently, wow
While the sun beats unmercifully now
His horse bows his head
While the only thing said
A one syllable question - how?

OK, up to a couple of days ago I knew nothing about ledger art. Then it was given as the Boxing Day prompt on Sketching Every Day. To quote Wikipedia -"Ledger art is a term for Plains Indian narrative drawing or painting on paper or cloth. Ledger art flourished primarily from the 1860s to the 1920s. A revival of ledger art began in the 1960s and 1970s. The term comes from the accounting ledger books that were a common source of paper for Plains Indians during the late 19th century." I rather enjoyed the challenge of making this one. First I found a page from a vintage manuscript, copied it, and printed out a page. Onto this I used a 0.5mm ink sketching pen to copy elements from two very modern ledger art designs which I found. The painting in was done using watercolour pencils. 

One Sketch 270) (Thursday 20th December) Franz Marc

Horse stamp explosive Earth
Which shatters
then re-forms

On Sketching every day, several times a month the prompt is a featured artist. Yesterday was German artist Franz Marc, killed in the 1916 Battle of Verdun. I will be honest, this early 20th century expressionist style isn't usually my cup of tea, but I look at this, and it looks far more modern than it is - you can certainly see the influence Marc and others had on the development of graphic art throughout the 20th century. This is a copy of a woodcut.

One Sketch 249) Don Blanding

I never wish
For narrow fish
I'm a man who has to say
I'd much prefer a manta ray.

Now that I've completed my self imposed mission to create Christmas cards, I followed today's prompt on Facebook's Sketching Every Day group. This is a copy of a design by American artist Don Blanding. I didn't know his work before, but some of his work I've now seen has this wonderful graphic quality which just lights my candle.