Colour

Cool Colours

 

Warm colours

These were simple colour test seeing how warm and cool colours effect the mood of the painting. As you can probably tell by the fact they look like they’ve been done by a complete and utter degenerate, landscapes aren’t really my thing and I work a lot better with blues and purples than I do with warmer colours – mostly because I feel like you can express more with them; they can make an orange or yellow sing, convey shadows in the sun, express all kinds of emotion as long as you use them in the right way. By comparison, i think all other colours seem relatively dead without them to lift things up.

The castle in the image is Dolwyddelan and I only really happened up on it by chance, having to pass through Snowdonia on the way back from a christening in Rhosneigr, Anglesey. The whole area is quite impressive, with these enormous, towering mountains that instill a sense of awe and foreboding. You can almost see the origins of many folktales and mythical creatures, in a world where the earth lives around you and towers above any thing you might even dream of, it would be easy to believe in giants and hidden worlds.

I’d forgotten how much I loved writing…

I kind of stumbled upon this by chance, in search of some of the essay pieces I did for A level Art – mostly because I was feeling too lazy to write about two pictures for my assignment on composition and though I’d reuse them, but for the record I sounded like my brains were falling out of my ears and I had no idea what I was talking about (which is probably true) so I’ve decided to be a good student and actually do what I was supposed to do… just… later… Anyway, in my frantic quest of laziness I found some of the projects I’d done for for my English course. Both text transformations, one of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the other of Jonne Donne’s The Sun Rising (if you’re not aware of it or haven’t read it you should go have a look just because it’s a really beautiful poem), rewriting them in good old fashioned prose, with a few hints of Gothic and Romantic writing. But after reading them again after what must be about a year now, I’m actually quite proud of myself. I know they’re not masterpieces, but I remember when I sent them in to be marked for the first time, practically crapping myself because I was scared the teachers would think they were terrible or that I was stupid. But around then I spent most of my time writing, just little silly things, short stories, the foundations for about three hundred novels, because my head was packed with so many ideas. Thinking about it, I really do miss writing but I don’t have the time or the energy to do it – I’m too busy being a grown up with grown up responsibilities and grown up worries and I think I’ve left all my old ideas stagnant for so long they’ve all distorted and become kind of void.

Though, if you’re interested, they’re under the cut (if it decides to work):

Drawing from Life

I’ve always enjoyed drawing people, for as long as I can remember. There’s always something in it that can be turned into the object of an art, be it a face, expression, stance or simply a shape in the tone of the skin or along the borders of the body. I think it’s because it’s relateable. We attribute our own emotions onto people in a way that you can’t to, say, a dog or a landscape. Even the the most blank and emotionally void of expressions can be interpreted as reflective or relaxed as long as the body is doing something to remotely suggest it, even if that something is just the state of its existence. I find drawing people from behind interesting for this reason – you can still put emotion or at least some kind of feeling into people without having to see their face; you can express personality just by the way someone sits and stands. I think this is why I find those ten foot tall, photo-realist, portraits of a head (which usually, if not always, have plain white or cream backgrounds with perhaps a dash of dull grey shadow on them to make things just a little more exciting) that seem to be all the rage at the moment so mind-numbingly, infuriatingly… boring – and I hate that word, especially when talking about art, but there really is nothing to them that I can see. You can’t feel the artist, they’re too busy burying themselves in painting the pores on the sitters’ nose and trying to win the competition for the most anal portrait of the year for twentieth time in a row, and the sitter might as well not be there for all the interest and emotional or intellectual stimulation it evokes, I wager the same reaction – if not better – could be drawn from a very detailed painting of some lichen on a brick wall.

Though enough with the ranting. The drawings I’ve posted were recording people’s movement over the period that they were being drawn – most noticeably in the arms, being the easiest things to redraw and retouch, along with the fact that the bodies barely moved and they did it was only by a fraction that would still work with the image that existed. It was quite difficult to an extent. I prefer picking people to draw for one pose that I find particularly interesting or attractive and because they’re doing something that requires them to stay still for long periods of time or in the cases where movement is necessary, they return to their original position eventually, like reading a book or working on a computer. The in-class drawings were particularly hard, the people you drew moved based on the movements of the people they themselves were drawing or were moving at a constant and when they’d give up and move away was wholly unpredictable, leaving quite a few unfinished drawings at the end of things. At home it was a lot easier. My friends are quiet, computer using people and could sit still for a month if they were given the opportunity so the extent of drawable movement there was most in the hands.