Month: July 2025
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The highlight on her bum, tho
This one has been resting for a while, and I pulled her up onto the easel today to have a play. The values in her skin tones were pretty bland, and I wanted to try and experiment with the idea of coloured lighting, because that’s what you’d expect from a place with a pole. This…
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My Sad Onion Joy
I acquired a new collectible today, and I am completely in love with it. This wee sketch in my sketchbook doesn’t do it justice, it is the most darling, adorable, sad little onion ceramic lidded pot on the planet. The world is a horrible place, full to the brim with horror, and people telling you…
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Three Value Thirst
Giving my decrepit shitty brush a rest and pulling out a bright #4 for a value study portrait. I used caput mortuum and some titanium white to create three values on the palette, although I didn’t use much of the white in the end, because I decided to use the sketchbook paper as the lighter…
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Swatching Gouache
I’m going through a phase of being a bit reticent about sharing things I’ve been working on. I’m usually not that bothered, and so this is an interesting phase to work through, and ponder what is going on. I found that when I was doing the 100 Day Project (which I stopped after 55 oil…
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Stumpy Brush
One thing that’s not obvious when I post here is the difference in size between one sketch and another. I have a habit of doing these portrait sketches in an A4 sketchbook, but this one is in A3, so twice the size. “Big head, big head, big head” as Chandler would say. My poor little…
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Turquoise and Rain
At the risk of this blog morphing into a weather channel, today we had lots of rain, clouds, and cooler temps, in complete contrast to recent days, and it was glorious. It is still raining, and long may it continue. In the studio, I did a lot of pottering about shifting from one thing to…
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Good Hare Day
Both the temperature and the humidity dropped today, although it was still hot and humid by normal standards, but not as unbearable as the last few days. 100% humidity is just unfair. Anyway, I got a lot more time in the studio today, and got some good work done. I started out in the A5…
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Finding a Cool Spot
The weather is meant to change overnight and I can’t wait. I didn’t even bother with going in the studio today, and just grabbed a sketchbook, neocolor IIs and some fineliners and worked in the coolest room in the house. I worked in my A5 spiralbound sketchbook, which is quite random inside. I filled a…
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Dry Media Day
This looks quite blue to me, but that’s probably because all the curtains were closed to try and keep the temperature down. I don’t know what to say about people who are in denial about climate change. Do they live in a temperature controlled basement? This is Scotland during the school holidays, it’s meant to…
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Painting Without Seeing Colour
The heat continues to build, and I continue to grunch aboot it. I spent most of the day working in sketchbooks, in the coolest room in the house, but I did get the paint out to play with this portrait for a while. I plopped some colours on a gel plate and then experimented with…
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More Hot Paint
It’s even hotter than yesterday, so I should consider knocking the acrylic painting on the head for a while. I decided this after I was already committed to this piece, tho, so I kept going. The boring parcel of yesterday becomes the interesting basis for this exercise. I cut a piece off the cartridge paper…
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Hot Paint
I did a bit of rearranging today. I have a large box full of canvases in various sizes, but I never use them because the box had a wooded board on top that became a kind of shelf for other things. So I’ve shuffled things around a bit, and maybe I will start using more…
Thrummie Bizzum 