A Renioresque watercolour

I saw a photograph on www.paintmyphoto.ning.com and was immediately taken with it.  Although the photograph was fairly recent, it had that old fashioned look about it.  This was just asking to be painted, so I did a watercolour of it tonight.

I am not one for painting flowers, in fact I am not very good at it, but my hope is that the little girl will attract the attention more.

Wise old man

Don't really know why I called this drawing 'Wise old man'.   He certainly looks thoughtful, but what could he be thinking  about?

I am not really sure where the original drawing is at the moment.  I found this image on a website that I used to visit regularly.  This was part of a drawing challenge.  

Looking at the date, I couldn't believe that I had done this in 2011.

Where has all the time gone?

Strike thoughtful pose . . . 

The Red Pen.

This loose watercolour figure painting is typical of the type of work that I have been doing recently.  It is similar to another painting on here called, 'Reflection', whereby the subject is busy writing on a piece of paper.  

In this version the person is turned around more towards the viewer.  His head leans forward, which presents interesting foreshortening challenges.  With not much to look at in the way of features,  the focal point moves towards his hands.  This was the real attraction to me.  I am a big fan of drawing and painting hands.

The skin tones on view on the hands, arms and face have a subtle mixture of warm and cool tones sitting adjacent to each other.  The blue shirt and grey hair give an overall cool cast to the figure.

Wrong pastels.

This a really old effort from me.   I bought a set of pastels years ago, thinking that they were the soft kind.  Turns out that it was oil pastels.    I had a pad with various shades of pastel paper for working on.  I blindly did a few pictures.  Had no idea what I was doing really!  I was studying some Rembrandt work at the time, so I had a go at copying one of his oil paintings.  The resulting creation, although the head is too large, ended up looking rather like the original.  I didn't have a black  crayon in the box, so I used a . . . wait  for it . . . An eyebrow pencil.  

Funny how things work out.  

Loose ink Elvis

It is good to get back to painting for myself,  after a long period of commissions over the Christmas period.

I was looking through some old You Tube videos of a young Elvis Presley in action.  I knew the exact pose I wanted and I also could visualise how it was going to look.  I wanted lots of movement and energy in the painting, so I opted for Indian ink and my trusty painting tool, the plastic fork with one tine.

Using the fork as a painting tool allows me to be very sketchy and loose.  I added two  shades of blue watercolour for his denims and a little red and yellow ochre for the skin tones.  The whole painting took around three minutes to complete.  Freeze framing the video gave me the exact pose that I was looking for.  Perfectly balanced, he wound up to a big finish for his song.

The film was Called Loving You.  His second movie.  Hope you like my interpretation.

My first 3D pavement drawing.

It has been a while since my last blog.  It has been a busy time for me over the festive period.  In my last blog I mentioned 3D drawings and my involvement in that area.  I am pleased to say that I have been invited to Celtic Park, Glasgow tomorrow to discuss a large 3D pavement drawing on the ground outside the stadium.  I would be creating it on a match day, so as to attract maximum attention.  Proceeds will be going to Celtic's charity.
I will be listing the exact charities that will benefit from this in a later blog, along with pictures from the day.  Looking at possibly April sometime.

Here is the prep drawing that I have been working on.  you will notice that it is seriously out of proportion.  This is necessary in order to get the 3D effect when viewed from a certain angle.

 

 

The finished chalk drawing will be at least twice this size, which will make it around 18 feet long and 3 feet wide.