Oooh, it's all gone a bit strange in the toy department. I seem to be going from nice 'nursery' pictures to something rather weird. While I'm in a quiet period, I'm playing about with a new series of paintings, with a view to having a Real Life exhibition - if any gallery will have me. This almost certainly won't happen, as with any luck some proper paying work will come along, but I'm following a theory a friend used to have - if he was waiting for a bus, and it took ages coming he would roll a ciggy, and as soon as he lit up, a bus would appear and he'd have to put it out. So maybe if I plan a batch of oddly shaped toys (mutant doesn't sound very nice does it?) then a juicy publishing job will turn up.
I always struggle with colour. It doesn't come naturally; I can pull it off, but it is the equivalent of a ballerina doing a seemingly effortless set of moves. She seems to float on air, while inside her shoes her feet are bleeding. OK, maybe not that extreme, but I do have to plan carefully or it all goes horribly wrong. With these paintings I want to include more interesting backgrounds and unusual colours. Vintage meets kitsch. This dog was to have a seventies feel, and you can't get more seventies than a nice brown/orange combination. So I did some hunting on the internet for original designs and found some samples. Here is the rough taken into a well known paint programme and rather crudely touched in, using original wallpaper clips to help me.
I always struggle with colour. It doesn't come naturally; I can pull it off, but it is the equivalent of a ballerina doing a seemingly effortless set of moves. She seems to float on air, while inside her shoes her feet are bleeding. OK, maybe not that extreme, but I do have to plan carefully or it all goes horribly wrong. With these paintings I want to include more interesting backgrounds and unusual colours. Vintage meets kitsch. This dog was to have a seventies feel, and you can't get more seventies than a nice brown/orange combination. So I did some hunting on the internet for original designs and found some samples. Here is the rough taken into a well known paint programme and rather crudely touched in, using original wallpaper clips to help me.
And here is the final, using similar colours -the actual paper design is my own. Working out the basics on the PC saves a lot of time and grief. I like the wallpaper and the basic dog shape, but I wish I'd stuck to my original plan of having the eye patch a dirty grey, instead of green. What I would like to do is enlarge it and do a really big version. If the bus turns up (as it were) I'll be doing some more of these.
'Buttercup' Bidding has started on the online auction mentioned below, at Hidden Haven Homestead blog. It's got off to a good start, and there's more to come. Go on, go and have a look...there's a lot of nice things to be found and new things being put up every day.
