Category Archives: art

Mixed media scene

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I love watching Chris Forsey paint, in fact I could watch him paint all day, he can take rather ordinary scenes  and fill them with vibrancy and life.  Over the last couple of months I have tried different painting techniques using a variety of media.  Chris Forsey’s video, Pushing The Boundaries Of Watercolour, shows you how he starts with a couple of sketches or photos and takes you through his thinking process and how he achieves his resulting masterpieces.  I have tried to follow a couple of his paintings from start to finish while changing them ever so slightly.  I do like my results but still see many mistakes.   This was painted using oil pastels, watercolour, and acrylic inks on bamboo paper.

Coast watercolour painting

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Here is my latest attempts at a watercolour painting.  I was working through Paul Taggart’s lessons and although I did learn a lot I haven’t really done them justice.  I am still a bit heavy handed with the paint and my colour mixing needs more practice.  There is so much I don’t like about this painting but in doing it I did learn quite a bit and after all I do need the practice.  I used bamboo paper just because it was handy and in a gummed block but next time I do watercolour I will use watercolour paper and maybe even stretch it myself as I haven’t tried that yet.  Thanks for the lessons Paul.

Sketchbook Project 2014 Organised Chaos (page 13) Circles

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So here is my last double page and it is where I have put my contents.  The contents are in circles and little circles join them all like a chain.  Think of cycles and life cycles, some planetary orbits, mushroom rings, ripples from a single rain drop, flower heads, rock formations craters, and many more.  Chains of events one leading to another and some branching off.  This was mostly acrylic paint and computer generated text.

That was my last page of my little book.  I hope you have enjoyed it and I hope it stands up to it’s tour with the Sketchbook project.

Sketchbook Project 2014 Organised Chaos (page 10) Fractals

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Of all the beautiful fractal (self – similar) patterns that are out there I chose to do rather a plain page to depict them.  I couldn’t make up my mind if I wanted to draw trees or feathers or rivers or ferns or nerves or mycelium or a thunder bolt or crystals or snowflakes or alveoli or blood vessels or……. …..So I made my trees look a bit like feathers which looked a bit like furrows on a hillside with mountains in the background and I added some ferns and angelica type plants.  This page was done using watercolour pencils and a black Pitt pen.

Sketchbook Project 2014 Organised Chaos (page 8) Annelids

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I just love doing this kind of doodle!  I was thinking about the fact that earthworms take the dead leaves and make lovely rich compost from them – just another one of natures recyclers.  If it wasn’t for nature’s recyclers what would our Earth look like today I wonder?  I had gesso-ed the page first but forgot that my water soluble graphite pencils would not blend they way I had wanted them to on that sealed surface so I changed to ordinary graphite pencils and blended them with a paper stump instead   Also used a copic multi liner pen and a pink pencil.

Sketchbook Project 2014 Organised Chaos (page 7) Dendrites

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I didn’t plan to do this page really, but instead, I was going to do one large dendrite with lots of branches off.  I was playing around with my inks and compressed air and decided to do lots of interconnections like those in the brain (hence the grey background).  I did think that if I just tried to go vertical and horizontal only then it would not look as messy as if I had blown the ink in all directions. Everything is interconnected in some way or other.