Month: January 2025
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Quick Draw
We had visitors all day today, so there was very little time for art. I managed a quick play in my junk journal drawing a face with my non-dominant hand in a continuous line. I had enough time to do a few bits with paint, and then the dog visitor arrived. There were humans too,…
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Mixing Blacks
When I am painting I really try to focus on value, and I have mentioned before different ways of analysing values as I am working. My favourite way is using my small rectangle of red perspex to view my painting as I am working. It’s simple, and instant. Once I started focusing on values, and…
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Big Paper Messy Play and Discoveries
This is a very large sheet of paper, so large that it’s really too large for either of my studio benches. It’s from the pack of Snowdon paper I bought with a gift voucher, and I am having a lot of messy fun. There’s acrylic ink, paint, gesso, art markers, collage, some of those punched…
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The Vivienne Tribute Portrait
I have a list of people that I am interested in painting, and when I added The Vivienne to that list I did not imagine for one second that I would be painting them following their death. RIP queen, 32 is far too young to have left us. I think I have finished my tribute…
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Back to the Glam
Resting the portrait was slowly morphing into avoiding the portrait which risks slowly morphing into not finishing the portrait, so I had a quiet word with myself and squeezed some paint on the palette. I have changed the eyes and the jawline, done more work on the lips and nose, and I am much, much…
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Priming Papers
I’m still resting that portrait, not least because I did not sleep well at all last night, for a number of reasons. For today’s creativity I watched this week’s Let’s Face It class with Deanna Strachan-Wilson. I like her process, and I spent a bit of time pondering how to respond to the class in…
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Painting Tools and Collage Fodder
I ended up with only a short amount of time for art today, and I decided I wanted to give my portrait a rest, and have some space from it, before going in to hopefully finish. Instead I did some simple play in my old sketchbook, not really trying to create anything, just moving paint…
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Making Fake Believable
Today was all about the hair, and a few tweaks to the lips and eyes, but I wasn’t in the mood for doing much to the face. I think what’s left to do to the face needs to happen at the end, once all the colours everywhere else are in place. This is a really…
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Refining the Eyes
I spent most of my painting time today on the eyes and lips. They still need some adjusting, but they are getting there. I also blocked in the dress. This is an interesting challenge, not least because I don’t often paint clothes, and this dress is covered in crystals. It’s also a little bit see-through,…
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Drama Queen
This was looking absolutely terrible to me, I mean leaving the room in a flounce considering pouring gesso over it terrible. I’m invested in doing this one well. I came back and mixed a close-to black and used the palette knife to put it on the background, and it immediately looked much better, and I…
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Painting a Queen
I spent a chunk of time fiddling with the charcoal sketch today, before starting to apply paint. There are still some proportions that need to be fiddled with, but I am happy with the way this one is going. Til the morn, Suzanne 327/400
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It’s very pink, darling
After a lot of pottering cleaning gel plates, and gel plate storage clamshells, and cleaning stencils, and brayers, and brushes, and brush pots, and then sorting out the cat litter bucket for all my acrylic water, ready for collection tomorrow, I got stuck in to working on a 16×20″ canvas. For some reason this pic…
Thrummie Bizzum 