The third piece based on one of my photos and another possible submission for the Twitter Art Exhibit. I love textures and details, both natural and man-made, and so these layers of road markings and mendings caught my eye when I was out for a walk. As with the previous postcards, I've continued using this… Continue reading Road markings
The second painting based on one of my photos, and another possible submission for the Twitter Art Exhibit. As well as using it as motivation to work from some of my photos, I also thought it would be a good opportunity to play with different media. I used watercolour paint and coloured pencils on the… Continue reading White fence
I’ve been meaning to make some art based on my photographs and I finally got around to it. Part of my motivation was being reminded about the Twitter Art Exhibit: it's an annual art show with artists of all calibres donating postcard-sized art which is then sold in aid of a particular charity. I have… Continue reading Tree gazing
This workshop — True North Star — used to be offered as a standalone class by Laly Mille, though it's now only included in one of her longer classes. It was also one of the bonuses with Wanderlust 2021 and that's how I came to make this. And one of these days I will managed… Continue reading Star-gazing hare
I was tidying up a bit and found three strips of paper left over from another project (from cutting the paper into squares for the Woodland abstracts). Rather than put them away and continue tidying, I turned them into this abstract triptych with acrylic paint, alcohol and gilding flakes. The tidying still isn’t finished… Apologies… Continue reading Green & gold abstracts
I showed you the final results from taking Judy Woods free stARTs class last week, and I thought it might be interesting to see how one of the paintings developed from start to finish. The class was very much an exercise in letting go and trusting in the process; we only knew what that day's… Continue reading Woodland abstracts – oak
Oak leaves I don't do people in my art, and while I love animals I am not drawn to representing them either, still life rarely moves me. Instead I tend to focus on nature and landscape, details, and, more recently, abstracts. But it's hard to know where to start with an abstract sometimes and harder… Continue reading Woodland abstracts
Series: Wanderlust 2021 #32 One of the favourite pieces I made during Wanderlust 2019 was in the inspired by an artist theme where we had to draw influences from two artists. Similarly, this piece draws on another artist's style, but it won't be counting in my favourites from this year. The idea was to look… Continue reading Wanderlust: colourful landscape
This started out as a three colour abstract inspired by a video from Kim Dellow. I do like a lot of abstract art, though I am still trying to work out exactly what appeals to me and what doesn't. As I said, this started out as just three colours, but I decided it needed some… Continue reading “Swipe” abstract painting
I was about to say that I only really use my acrylic paints for colour and texture on mixed media work and that I never really just paint with them. Then I started wondering if that was actually true so I had a quick search in my blog archives and realised that I have used… Continue reading Simple acrylic landscape
This is literally junk. Or at least it was before I got my black paint out. I'd been using cotton buds to put blobs of colour on the top of some acrylic paint bottles so I could quickly see which was which. And then I'd wiped the excess paint off onto a piece of card;… Continue reading Abstract negative painting
The guest instructor for week three of the Wanderlust "inspired by another artist" theme was Tanyalee Kahler (website, Instagram). A severe lack of energy means that I have done very little creative work over the last couple of months; if it didn't have to be done (like the two birthday cards), then it didn't get done.… Continue reading Delaunay-Holdsworth
The guest instructor for week two of the Wanderlust "floral" theme was Shawn Petite (website, Instagram, YouTube). I love Shawn's work and regularly watch her YouTube videos, especially the Sunday Inspiration ones. Lovely textured layers of collage papers, modelling paste and acrylic paint all come together to create a wonderfully weathered background for the flowers.… Continue reading Wanderlust: serenity flowers
The first week of the Wanderlust "floral" theme and, as usual, we started with the organiser Kasia Avery (website, Instagram). In an ultimately vain attempt to avoid constantly running behind on the class schedule, I decided to temporarily skip the steampunk theme which has some quite time-consuming lessons in it and jump to the Floral… Continue reading Wanderlust: inky flowers
The last week of the Wanderlust "Patterns" theme and we're back with the organiser Kasia Avery (website, Instagram). It was too much to hope that there wouldn't be any more faces... and as for creating an "abstract self-portrait", well, it's only my determination to have a go at all of the Wanderlust lessons that meant… Continue reading Wanderlust: pattern portrait
Crafty Rat 