Weekend portrait sketch

 

Almost a big murky mess.

  The mass of hair like an oil spill and the aged face using pencil and oil paint all came about quite accidentally. I had to wipe off the pencil marks and paint with a cloth as it had started to look really murky and messy, but once I had done it the original colour underneath started to act as highlights around the cheeks and eyes, giving it tonal qualities that I hadn't expected at all. I need to work on the red border and leaf stencils before it's pretty much done.

Miss King

 I took the title from a short story by W.Somerset Maughan. Ingredients so far: canvas painted in black acrylic
pva glue
heavy watercolour paper
knitted fabric
old pages from a book
red handmade tissue paper
forest print taken from a 1969 calender
black permanent marker

If all goes well,I'm going to post a video of this (new technological territory for me...) showing this piece in the making.

I said I wouldn't

  but I just have to show it. I'm so happy with the green tones and the overall arrangement of swirly foliage. The tricky part will probably be the hummingbirds. I spend alot of time staring at my work to sort out what colours I want to choose rather than having a set of colours arranged before hand. It's abit spontaneous but I find that it works for me. Just to go with the flow and see where it takes me. I've learnt alot from this repainting, it has made me a much more patient person, appreciating attention to detail and the enjoyment of a work in progress rather than the desire to just finish it and hang it up. There was a vast amount of wasted paint in both this repainting and the previous one (my garden of earthly desires). Very much a case of lesson learnt.

Doily heaven

 I have a stash of vintage doilies, napkins and tea towels, all of which I saved from the bottom of a trashbin. I am clueless when it comes to sewing or doing anything nifty with fabric, but I'm determined to do a few flower pins with them.

A very stressed bride to be

Did I ever mention I was getting married? Probably not. Half the time I forget to write about myself when I post things on this blog. I'm not very good at maintaining an air of artistic mystery so why bother trying? Well Miss Khairun will indeed be getting hitched this summer, and in respect towards both my love for all things Portuguese and and all things Bengali, I'm going to have two weddings! A Bengali wedding in London with my closest friends and family, and a Portuguese wedding in Lisbon, with as many bitesized meat pastries as you can eat. They have a thing about pastries around here. This is not a veggie-friendly country at all.
So the number of things I have to organise are running about in my head and giving me headaches. I had a Toblerone meltdown lastnight. Not a very good idea since I'm supposed to be on a pre-wedding diet. And I still haven't painted either. Miss Khairun has to get her act together and start being more focused and less with the under hypnosis look that I've been having recently.
And no more Toblerones either. Especially if I want to look like her. Along with the right lighting too. and make up. And very generous parents.

Instead of painting...

Toblerone is my Achilles' heel. I wanted to paint today but as you can see, I've been distracted by things like this.

Before..

 

..and after.

 

Still here!

Not quite sure why I haven't posted anything recently...hmmm, it might just be because I haven't finished those painting I promised to reveal only at the very end. Deary me. Well, since I'm still trying to finish them I thought I would write a little bit more about myself. Everybody loves lists so lets start with that then. A list of what I hate, or at least gets me a little jumpy.
1. Mistaking my tea for turpentine. It has happened twice already, a swirl of titanium white in my mint tea. GRRRRRR
2.Abandoned furniture. But yesterday it turned out to be a good thing because we saved the most beautiful antique chest of drawers and its now sitting in our kitchen. With no knobs, but I'm sure we'll have lots of fun sorting that out. Not.
3. Being encouraged by shop assistants to buy something because it looks so 'fabulous' on me, and then going home and hating both the item of clothing and the shop assistant. And I'm really not a hateful person. Honest!
4. Cleaning my paintbrushes. It's not therapeutic or enjoyable. It's bloody annoying.
5.People who seem to find it physically impossible to smile.
6. The glaring screen of mobile phones in cinemas. It doesn't seem to occur to people to not just put the thing on silent, but keep it closed too.
7.Not waking up early enough to paint before going to work. This gets to me. It really does, because not only does it distract me from concentrating at work (I'm an English teacher by the way) but it increases the chances of getting tired with one piece. My mind starts to wander into future projects.
8. That's about as many hateful things as I can stand writing about now.

weekend sketch

Another one of my wistful looking ladies. I decided to be alittle more constructive with these random sketches of mine, hence the notes and little magazine cut outs for ideas on my colour palette. I wanted to head out to some art shops downtown but the weather was lousy. So I've been looking through other artist's blogs and sighing. A very unproductive thing to do. I feel like I have little direction in terms of completing pieces. My studio is a hodgepodge of ideas tried and tested, the good ones are staring back at me on my desk hoping to be fully realised, and the failed ones are crumpled around my feet.
The sketching process has been productive but I really really want to complete something that is good enough for another person to want and not just for the walls of my apartment...
Well, I have'nt got the right materials now and using turpentine at night turns me into an insomniac. So I might just tuck into a nice movie before hitting the sack. Wanna be up bright and abnormally early tomorrow.

 

Paint the town green and gold

We were on our way to Alcantara for drinks with friends.

 

Japanese style tree sketch

This is a sketch for a piece I'm planning as a birthday gift for my boyfriend Antonio. He's a music promoter and Jazz pianist. He loves Japanese and Chinese art, traditional and modern. He never reads my blog! So this will hopefully remain a surprise to him when I finish the piece. Will post it when it's done.

 

A tiny sneak preview..

of my recent decision to repaint some old pieces. You can see how messy I am too.

 

They say you can tell alot about a person by the books they have on their shelves....Lonely Planet guide, Marcel Proust and a collection of nude photography... books make me me very happy indeed.