Monday 27 January 2020

Art and Technology

I have been tweaking my website and blog lately, trying some new styles and themes.  Technology and the ease of creating your own website (I made mine by just following YouTube videos) can be a great help to artists.  It can also be a large time waster!

I find when I am stuck on a painting or hesitant to ruin a new canvas, I start looking for inspiration on Instagram or on-line, or start doing 'business related' tasks.  Anyhooo... that's what is happening now.  I have a painting I am trying to do in acrylic vs oils and I am unsure about my background - so I am changing themes and styles and working on the blog.  Above is a video recorded in time-lapse mode on the iPad of the drawing portion of my painting.  The process for making these time lapse videos used to be longer and much more challenging - now most phones have a time-lapse button and you can have that sucker on instagram faster than should be allowed.  Ah, tech... I love / hate you.

Wednesday 15 January 2020

Night painting

I have wanted to attempt a 'nocturnal' painting and have done a couple of sketches in the past.  This is my first attempt with oil colours.  It's from a photo of my brother, getting the bonfire started for our Christmas sledding and fireworks party.  I think I will attempt a larger scale one this year, maybe squeeze in more of the family.

11 x 14 Oil on Canvas

Thursday 9 January 2020

Another Process Post

the grid and drawing
One of the BEST places to visit on this planet is Haida Gwaii, on Canada's west coast.  It is spectacularly beautiful.  I travelled there with my family a few years ago and we had a wonderful time.  We learned a lot about the Haida people's culture and history, we ate great food, we met friendly people and we took an epic trip on a zodiac boat to one of the culturally significant sites.  I have painted a couple pictures from photos, but I took soooo many photos that I could probably keep painting.  I hope to get back there again some day to do some Plein air painting.

starting in with the oil paints



Nearing completion - picky details will take another couple of days