recent art

In wetcanvas.com I did the November challenge of a page a day in the Art Journal forum. In December it is the 12 days of Chritsmas - I'm 1/3 of the way through that.

Here are some of the November pages.


Coloured pencil leaves


graphite sketch from my photo of someone's happy dog on the beach



Horses - Backgroud in acrylic then I pick out shape swith ink and acrylic. I like doing these 'found horses'. A bit like the scribble patterns we used do as kids.


coloured pencil - kiwi ornaments


Totara tree in coloured pencil from memory


graphite - HB and 4B


nanny goat pen and graphite


vase in Coloured pencil


more found horses acrylic and pen


my car




Form a shot I got of a wax eye in our garden - coloured pencil


coloured pencil. Although the moleskine notebook is good I did not push this to take the maximum layers but left sketchy


ink Macrocarpa trunk. I love these trees so full of character. The lines of them bordering farmers' field are thining. The silhouettes of their stately shapes are still eye-catching


Acrylic from my own photo

life drawing workshop 2

I did this one in pastels. About 2.5 hours as I had a bit of a funny tummy with the antibiotics I was on so I left early.

Interesting to look at it later and see what could be done better. The RHS end of the mouth. Close, more blending in some part. But is is threeD and was fun.

Last weeks' one looks a little stif, but he wasn't IRL

portrait workshop

The local art shop is run by two artists. They have just started portrait workshops, no tutor, on Saturday afternoons for 4 hours. At $20 it's a great opportunity to sketch, paint from live models.

The first weekend I just used graphite to try and get my eye in again.
The second weekend I used pastels. Messy fun.

Writing Group

I have been a member of a writing group for 9 years or so. Members have come and gone and recently we have looked for, and found, more writers as we were down to three and that's not as good for creating energy.

A writing group, meetin gin person rather than on-line, is great for discussion. On-line you have the feedback but it is harder for a discussion. We email our submissions once a month and meet up the following weekend to discuss and give our critues of each others work.

Amazing how often writers seem to ahve an interest, or have had an interest or done some other form of creative enterprise such as art or music.

I used to follow two artists' blogs on line - Maggies Stiefvater and Wendy Prior - because they both worked in couloured pencil and wrote very entertaining blogs. Now both of them are concentrating on writing and Maggie has published two books with a third coming.

Me - I'm still dithering between art and writing LOL.

I brought a painting on-line last week and it has arrived! Even better IRL - Edgar's Horse by John McNelley. His paintings often tell a story and have amazing colour . His website -
http://web.me.com/john.mcnelley/catalogue/1.html
Sorry. Not sure how to do a hyper link.

The painting I have bought is currently on the third page - A vibrant landscape with Edgar's horse on the top of the hill/rock to the right.

Edgas Degas paiting a picture of a horse galloping away and the jockey on the graound. Someone made a chance remark, 'What happened to Edgar's horse?'. And the idea for the painting presented itself to John.

Question; writers also interested in other creative enterprises? If there is a group of artists, how often do they also write? Maggie and Wendy do. Is that a common thing?

Mum

Finished Mum's Portrait. She had her 94th birthday last month and I took the photo fo rher portrait a few weeks prior to that.

Mixture of pastels on Cnason Mi-teintes paper.

I went to a pastel workshop in March with Lyn Diefenbach. She used the paper so I did. It's the first time I have really got to grips with paper and managed to fill all the indentations in the paper. I had just not been bold enough before.