Random paintings

On we go through the random delights of Acrylic April 2020. And, in my own personal opinion, this first one is actually delightful! Look at my slightly worried piglet.

Isn't it cute? I do not know why blue is such a good colour on a piglet, but it is. And actually the next one is pretty cool too, the movement on the wine was very interesting - none of the lights and darks went where I thought they would but they ended up looking like plausible movement. I am pleased with my bottle too.

And here are some eggs probably not found in nature (but I haven't seen many birds eggs lately). I like the highlights on these too. I think I prefer painting objects and things rather than landscapes.

Do-over weekend

Given that last weekend was de-railed by a bad cold, and it's been a busy two weeks, I took Monday as a holiday for myself and had a long weekend at the beach. The weather was beautiful so I went for several long walks. They've re-done the public wharf (tiny little jetty really) on the river so I took a panorama from the end. It was just beautiful.

And here is a shot from the headland, that I'm sure I've taken before, but you kind of just come across this view unexpectedly and it is always stunning. I walked all the way along that beach and around the headland at the end. It was delightfully warm - happy in t-shirt sleeves - but I wasn't tempted to swim. 

And in more cliff-weirdness news you can possibly just see a bloke with a hydrofoil board knee-deep to the left of the current marker. He scrambled down the cliff (bare feet, wetsuit, large board), picked carefully across the rocks and then painstakingly drifted his board over the river to get somewhere deep enough to foil. Despite there being a perfectly good boat ramp about twenty metres to the left, and a big flat beach on the other side of the river. It looked painful. 

Mostly I had a sewing frenzy, which was extremely enjoyable. I'd been thinking about it for weeks so had a good few projects to do, which I did, with some successes. Our lemon tree is doing well after the big chop but still refuses to fruit. I am not sure if this means it will never fruit again, or if it is sulking, or if there is something wrong with it that we have to fix. It seems healthy enough.....

Acrylic April 2020

I have delved into the Youtube depths and found Acrylic April 2020 - a month of lovely paintings to do. I will branch out from the Art Sherpa eventually but right now I do like following along blob by painful blob. I am trying not to buy all the paints but it's hard because they are so pretty! Shocking no-one but me, expensive paints are generally much nicer than cheap paints, especially in the yellows and reds. It is quite frustrating when they are too transparent.

Anyway we started off with a limited palette sunset landscape to get the feel for backgrounds and foregrounds and highlights. Nice.

Then we did a bug! I love this bug. I don't know if it is an actual bug or a mythical bug but it looks like a giant ladybird and I will go with that. Happy shiny bug.

And this is a phoenix growing out of a candle flame, so we can learn how to paint fire. This was not a lesson that sunk in very well, I don't know if it looks a lot like flames. At least I know this was not meant to be from life.

Other acrylic tutorials

I poked around the internet for other acrylic painting lessons or tutorials and did a couple... first up was a Domestika course from artist Hannah Webb who does really cool paintings using stylised blocks of colour. I love the look of her work but man it's hard to achieve ... when you have pieces of pure colour there's no scope for fiddling or smudging in the darks or lights, you have to have it in exactly the right place. And it's important that your edges are clean. My edges are filthy. I did a bird, it isn't great.

I also did one of the free beginners videos with Will Kemp, which was quite serious. Definitely more about the right way to do things in a classical sense, although I think that might be what I need at this point. My cherry is OK, but not as good as his, which has the blobs in just the right spot to look like shiny patches, and not blobs. I will do some more of his videos because he explains the theory behind it quite well, and I have no idea what I'm doing. 

It is ridiculously cold in Canberra this week - this is at 8 am this morning as I left for work. Minus two degrees! There was thick frost on the ground.

Head cold weekend

So my weekend was very boring ... I started feeling a bit sick on Friday afternoon and then spent Saturday and Sunday snuffling on the couch before perking up enough to come to work this morning! What a cruel world. I left the house once, on Saturday, to go to the chemist and get some nasal decongestant. The front page of the local paper this morning was about the emergency departments being overwhelmed by upper respiratory viruses so there are a few bugs about. 

On Friday morning I had a work visit to the Canberra Deep Space Centre out at Tidbinbilla which was fascinating but extremely cold in the thick fog. We were allowed to go into the operations centre where, sure enough, they're tracking Voyager out past the solar system. I just find this amazing, that there's a NASA facility half an hour away spending all its time peering into deep space. For scale, that sticking-up-bit in the centre of the dish (tower plus the three cones on top) is the height of a five storey building. A person wouldn't be much higher than the dark ring around the bottom. It's ENORMOUS.

Different art form

Number two went down to the shops on Tuesday to buy some spray paint and graffiti up a wall - apparently Canberra has heaps of places where you are authorised to paint and Melbourne has none! Although it is well known for fabulous laneway art, you have to have a permit, where Canberra has spots you can just go and bust out some sprays.

So he did a giant face. Isn't it great? I have no idea how you control a spray nozzle, it is a mystery indeed to me. And his lights and darks are all in the right spot. Nice! He says that none of the stuff he did in the past is still there, so it all gets painted over, but you know, it says something about the transient nature of existence. 

Melbourne

We drove down to Melbourne for the long weekend - to see number two and pick him up to take back to Canberra. It was a lovely few days. We stayed in an airbnb apartment on the outskirts of town that was very pleasant and convenient... although we knew when we booked it that it was in the same suburb as number two's flat, we didn't get the exact address until after booking and what do you know! literally 100 m down the road, we could just about lean out and see his place. Very nice. And a lovely view back to the city.

We went out to the Heide Museum of Modern Art, which was extremely interesting. Some nutty art but also beautiful grounds and interesting history. Then we did the obligatory IKEA run for a bookshelf for number two and bought him some sheets and towels, before catching up with an old friend for a very delicious fancy steak dinner. 

Saturday we went into the CBD to embarrass visit number two at his place of work, and poke around the shops. Sunday we went and caught up with another old friend who was on holiday down in Anglesea, about an hour and a half drive down on the southern coast. Neither of us had ever been there before and it was beautiful! Popular on a long weekend, apparently it is crazy busy in the summer. 

There was a big surf lifesaver competition on, so we stopped and watched for a while. Quite spectacular watching them go over the swells in those little boats. The day was sunny but the water would have been icy. 

Acrylic April completed!

Here is the last Acrylic April Attempt ... I have enjoyed this daily painting challenge very much, even though it took me until June. I have already started on Acrylic April 2020! Luckily all the videos are on Youtube. I have found that the paint-along format of an hour's video (although it takes me three hours, pause, erase, re-paint, pause, play) is easy to do in the evenings and the Art Sherpa has an excellent teaching style. All faults in the  paintings are mine, not hers.....

This one is inspired by Basquiat, and we looked at the power of half-erasing by scribbles or painting over, and words, and showing your drawing lines. And of course the odd face here and there. Can't say I love it but it's good to think about the intention behind all artistic choices.

Abstract animals

So the Abstract April included a few animals. Or abstractions of animals. First up is I think my favourite painting of the whole lot - a fish. Or rather an abstraction of fish, before Dad starts commenting about dorsal fins. It is the Idea of Fish. Swimming (angrily) in the Idea of Water. I did not like this one until about the last few minutes when it all came together and looked fish-like. I am going to varnish it and hang it up in the beach house to inspire my husband to catch fish.

The colourful horse is less successful. The proportions are wrong, it looks a bit chubby in the face. Maybe it's a baby horse? or a baby miniature horse? I like the colours though, and the eye. We got to do a bit of palette knife work in the background, that is always fun.

And we did an owl. This is just odd. I tried to get the pinfeathers looking feather-like but it just looks like two-day stubble. Hmmm.

Definitely winter

A quiet weekend this time - cloudy and a bit wintry. The ongoing decluttering continues ... with mixed success. I went through my bedside drawers and threw away many many receipts. Most of them were completely blank - they had been in there so long that the thermal paper had faded to illegibility. I figure I'm not returning any products from those receipts now so I could chuck them all! Along with single earrings, broken junk jewellery, twenty pens that don't work and broken off lip balm. 

Thursday night I went with a couple of friends for dinner and to see Kitty Flanagan who was very funny. Absolutely the middle-aged lady demographic and jokes but guess what! I find that both relevant and amusing. I am peak demographic though, I ran into several people I knew. Saturday night we went round to friends for a delicious dinner, so Sunday morning was a long fat walk in the cold and damp. The leaves are very pretty against a grey sky, but I certainly didn't take my jacket off. 

I also turned out the laundry cupboard, consolidated half-empty bottles of random things, threw away stubs of candles and put a box of 100 tea-light candles on the local buy nothing group. Several people wanted it, which surprises me. I am also surprised that we owned a 100-box of tea-light candles. Nobody wanted the three dozen party sparklers we have accumulated so I might just go into the backyard and light them. Hah.

More abstract landscapes

I'm still abstracting away. Here are a little clutch of landscapes, although I don't think this first one is anywhere anyone has ever been. The person is supposed to be an actual person, in some kind of fantasy landscape, but I've gone aliens again. This was not deliberate, I made the head too big and couldn't figure out how to change it. I tried to make the legs longer to compensate but it ended up wearing pantaloons. So I have an alien in jodhpurs, which is fine. And my forward rocks all look like crocodiles.

Here we have a waterfall. I like to think that every painting has something that works but I'm struggling a bit with this one. Maybe the sad near-dead shrubs on the right hand side? it is certainly very abstracted, and not at all realistic. I like the proportions, there, that's something. Again, this took AGES as I painfully added little blobs here and there.

And here we have a storm at sea. Not, as my husband suggested, a wave crashing down onto some trees, it is meant to be all wave. I don't hate the sky in this, it gives windy and a few clouds. The wave is a bit alarming, certainly not something you'd want to see on a boat. 

And this isn't really a landscape, just an idea of flowers. And dribbles (definitely deliberate! Except for the horizontal line, that is because I did EXACTLY the thing the teacher said not to do and dried it with a hairdryer ... blowing a very odd horizontal line across the page. But it's abstract so it's FINE)