Early adopter I’m not. I’ve finally scraped together a Nellie Windmill facebook page, just in time for the mass exodus to Google+. This feels very grown-up and a little scary. So if you’re like me and are hoping our Geek Overlords will fail in their evil attempts to foist yet another social media site on us, and you want to hang out with fellow reactionaries, come on over.
I’ve almost finished a painting that was done entirely with dry brushing! Do you have any idea how long a painting done entirely with dry brushing takes?! Nothing has ever taken this long. At the moment it’s my favourite way to create shading, but I’ve learnt from this experience to avoid it for fine detail work — bloody nightmare.
It always surprises me, the direction a painting takes. It’s rather delightful ending up with something that I couldn’t have dreamt up from a standing start. Sleepy French sheep certainly never would have crossed my mind!
The exquisite beauty of Lauren Gray’s art makes me ache. A while back, I wrote about how It would hurt to look at beautiful things I didn’t create in the days before I had found my way back to art making. I’m pretty sure if I had’ve lain eyes on the artwork of Lauren Gray during this time I would have torn asunder. I want to touch them, and smell them and hang them somewhere I will see every single day. I have a dear little list of artists whose original work I look forward to collecting when I have a house again and Lauren Gray shot to the top of that list as soon as I set eyes on her figurative work.
There are a few facets to my life. Most of you will already know that I used to be a social worker back in Australia before moving to Europe to live in a motorhome and paint like a vagabonding gypsy. What you probably don’t know is that I run an iPhone and Mac software development business with my partner, who’s a computer wizard (although I have mentioned our business a couple of times on the blog they’re the type of posts that get hidden deep within its labyrinthine bowels). It wasn’t always the plan that I’d help run the business but it just naturally emerged over time as the sensible thing to do.
There’s something really vulnerable about posting work-in-progress shots, isn’t there? It’s a lot less vulnerable once the work is complete and you can point to the finished piece and say, “see, it didn’t turn out so bad”. I’m learning to be more comfortable with the ugly stages of a painting. I used to get really down on myself whilst working on a piece because I didn’t know to expect ugly stages. This meant that for a time, I actually didn’t enjoy painting very much at all! That was a very strange time – I yearned to make art but wasn’t enjoying the process so I experienced a lot of shame about that. It was very confusing. It would’ve been nice to have someone to talk to about that at the time, but then I guess that’s what this blog is for. I vow to be braver with sharing my insecurities on this blog in the future.
I began these little guys in Wales when we were house-sitting over winter, finished them in Scotland, and I’m now posting them in Belgium! I think I’ve wanted to paint owls since I started painting but somehow have only just gotten around to it. I’m really looking forward to painting many, many more.
I was inspired by this blog article over at Imaginative Bloom, to create a collection of some of the yummiest wearables I’ve seen on the internet. Also, it’s my birthday month so, you know…
It’s taken me a long time to get this blog organised. Until relatively recently, it lacked focus. I used to post about my travels as well as my art and pretty much anything else that took my fancy. You may have noticed that the travel blog posts have stopped (as have the flights of fancy). We’re still travelling and we’re still blogging about it, but I wont be posting them here anymore. We have a blog — Technomadics — dedicated to our travels, so if you miss reading about our itinerant ways you can still get your fix.
I do still want to share the highlights here however, so I’ll be posting every now and then with the best photos from our recent travels and links to our latest blog posts.
This is an ancient little painting, circa the winter of 2009/2010. I was such a newb back then and there are sooo many paintings from that time, which I never got around to posting on the blog! Most of them won’t see the light of a bloggy day (although they are on Deviant Art and Flickr), but for some reason I still kinda dig this one.
Way back in February, I posted a few lessons I’ve learned as a self-taught artist. I thought I’d make a regular thing of it so when I’m a wizened granny I can look back on these posts and laugh incontinently at how young and dumb I was. Here is my hard-earned wisdom, gained betwixt the months of February and May:
