Category: Art and Photos

Art – Swan

After the roller coaster ride of my lovely ladies, I was rather tired. Swans are always beautiful – and as my Art class teacher showed me – white is not white. It is never pure white. It is mostly shades of colours. In this case more of a grey tinge. It was a new and fascinating concept to me, and it applies to many other features as wel..

I learnt that I have to examine carefully the colours of my subject. and a simple way is to punch a hole in a white piece of paper and hold that against your subject. This is a much better representation of the real colours (and so simple). I often put a dab of a paint colour that I have mixed up on the paper next to the hole to judge how close I am (that is if I am going for realistic colours).

Thanks to Nichola for such an easy tool that is so powerful!

Swan Study

New Lady (Mongolian)

After the previous grumpy girls, I decided to have another attempt at portraits, and chose this lovely, happy, enchanting lady from Mongolia. I did some research first on facial features and proportions, on skin colours and shadows. This took quite a while, and helped me understand what I was doing a bit better. But I seem to have ended up painting not really sticking to anything I had researched in any detail: more just feeling my way. I spent way too long on it, over worked it, struggled a lot with blending; but I had fun, and she always makes me feel better and brings a wee smile to my face.

I found this wonderful photo on the internet (sorry – not sure who took it), but it is cut out and altered