You are currently browsing the monthly archive for January, 2009.
Sumo wrestler feels the effect of gravity
I was trying to think of an image which best exemplified gravity. I intitially thought of an elephant on the edge of a crumbling cliff contemplating the gravity of its situation. But then I came across a lovely picture of a sumo wrestler being thrown just before impact with the canvas, Rather than copy it exactly I tried to focus on the moment of impact and removed detail. I began to regret including the throwing wrestler but in the end he’s not too bad. I didn’t do any pencil sketching to keep it freer.
I wanted to simplify the garden into simple shapes and colours, but I’ve still managed to complicate the picture. It was interesting trying, though.
This was a bit of an exercise, my first attempt at water reflections etc.
One of our walks in the Azores
First off – my painting is not this bright. I am using my new printer scanner at home and it has very little tonal control. If I had known I wouldn’t have put any yellow in the distance hill. Anyhow, the Azores are very green. This is from a walk we did round a caldera. I cheated by adding Sandra and me into the picture – when of course I was sitting across the other side of the lake painting this. Not that happy with this. Too blooby and overdone. And too bright – yuk.
This is about 10 mins into one of my favourite walks. Viv would like to guess where this is so I’ll name it in a comment. There should be a lot more foliage on the right, but after putting it in it just didn’t look right and I tried a rescue attempt. This is why the top right bit of sky is wrong – I just couldn’t get all the green out of the paper. Many other things wrong with it I know but I’ve enjoyed doing this one and there are a couple of good passages – I think
This is the stretch of the Thames at Shiplake, on a moody late afternoon on Boxing Day. I could have done so much more with it, but as this is Stretch Attempt 3 I’m painted out. The water is wrong because I had it right first attempt and then tried to change it after the paint had started to dry too much and the bank on the right could have had a lot more texture.
Waiting to fall
I thought that an apple tree would symbolise gravity. (As the Theory goes….) Just for you, Dave, here’s a scanned version of the same.
I read a bit about gravity before thinking what to do. 
It seems that rather than being a downwards force, gravity is a ‘together’ force. I wanted to show colours merging together, but of course, unless I could mould my paper into a bowl, it would always be a downwards the colours would merge. I then thought about rain pulled to earth by gravity. Sadly my rainy landscape looks messy, so I’ve included a more abstract representation.
Sandra doing a stretch
Sandra modeled for me but couldn’t hold the pose for more than a few minutes so my working time was kept quite short. My aim in this picture was too try and convey the tensions of stretching rather than worry too much about my accuracy. I think I managed it on the back leg but the rest was not so good. For a start I got the front leg too short so the foot doesn’t sit on the smae surface as the back foot.
This is a walk we did some time ago with friends, it was getting dark, snow on the ground, and just the last rays of the sun lower down the fell side. I couldn’t work out at all how to show the snow when none of it was white! I think I needed to use contrast better.
