Unfinished Business…

Well I still haven’t had any divine inspiration for my colleague’s piece and have been periodically looking at it in puzzlement all week 🙃 I’m beginning to wonder if a complete paint over is in order 🥴

Fortunately, it hasn’t stopped me creating altogether as I thought I ought to make a start on another painting a friend has asked me to do. I thought this one might be easier as she didn’t really give me any criteria for what she wanted. I knew she liked another piece that a mutual friend of ours has and that her living room has lots of red decor, so I came up with a spiral heart design that uses similar techniques to those I used for our friend’s piece. I have always loved the colour red but for some reason am not often moved to use it in my paintings so I have been tinkering around with ways of using different shades and doing some red doodles.

Anyway here is the painting so far. It still has a long way to go and I’m really not sure whether I like the spiral or not!

I’ve actually worked on quite a few different bits and bobs this week. My arty neighbour and friend Jan and I have begun travelling altered books, so I did the first page of that and we swapped them over yesterday. The idea is that we have an old book each and we choose a word from the page we intend to work on and create something based on that word, then we swap them over and respond to what the other has done. I can’t wait to get going with mine now as Jan had done a beautiful page based on the word ‘agate’. So lots of possibilities with inspiration from rocks and crystals there, right up my street!

I also had another go at a piece which has had a few incarnations already. I’m not sure why but it’s one of those that is proving to be hard work!

I’ve decided it’s going to be a case of layers upon layers until it feels done with this one!

I’m not sure if I mentioned before but my Mum gave me an awesome Christmas present- a ‘one sketch a day’ journal. I am usually dreadful at making myself draw even though I know how important it is to draw regularly as an artist and I was a teeny bit daunted by the idea of having to do it every single day as I’m also usually dreadful at sticking to things like that! I decided to take it as something fun, that I wouldn’t put any pressure on myself with and that I would just see what comes out each day and so far, I’ve absolutely loved doing it! I think it’s really helping to keep me in a creative mindset so I intend to continue. I think it’ll be great to look back on a year’s worth of drawings and see what happened from one day to the next 😊 Maybe I’ll do a post at the end of the year showing my favourites.

I have a couple of finished pieces to show this week, I got all excited about trying to make things look rusty, so these happened…

I might change the frame as it’s a little too deep really and takes away from being able to see how vibrant the colours are.

Here was some of the process…

I was so engrossed I forgot to take many pictures! I didn’t use many materials, just a baby wipe that had been used to wipe up some spilt hair dye, some old cement sand mixed with paint, some old tissue paper and a variety club charity heart badge which I removed the pin from. I quite like how it turned out but felt it could have looked more authentically rusty, so I then continued working on my old cake board…

It turns out old cake boards make great canvases! I just need to find something to put on the back so it can hang.

I definitely want to work on the rustiness technique more, I was looking at lots of rusty paint pictures on Pinterest and there’s so much more I can explore with this.

Some pics of how this evolved:

My mission for the coming week will be to continue with the two commision paintings I have on the go and to see if I can get at least one of my other unfinished paintings done and dusted. My studio space looks like a frame and canvas graveyard! I have a bit of a problem! 🫣