Annes' Blog

Oil Painting Al Fresco

2011-08-07T19:03:00.001Z

Here are my first few oil paintings on location..

Cheddar Gorge

2011-07-14T22:00:00.002Z

Went to Cheddar Gorge the other day. It was a baking hot day so I found a nice shady patch under a tree after having scrambled up the side of the gorge. Here's what I did,

Winkworth Arboretum

2010-11-01T01:50:00.000Z

Rome

2010-06-30T23:22:00.005Z

I've just come back from a few days in Rome. I tried to do as much painting as I could in between walking all across Rome seeing the various sights. It was a pretty knackering few days!
Here are a couple of my more successful efforts from painting. I was using gouache again. I'm quite pleased with the results, although I'm using more opaque paint than I would like. I like the effects you get when you layer up thin washes and I'm losing that at the moment.

On one of the days I took my pastels out.. and instantly regretted it! I really struggled with them. I think this was partly due to the subject matter. I was finding doing architecture pretty tricky with them as it's hard to get clean edges. I think I'll avoid man made structures until I'm a little more practiced with them!

New toys

2010-06-20T22:27:00.004Z

I got some new pastels last week. It's quite exciting! It's funny though, no matter how many different colours I have, it seems I never have the right ones! But I realised that, that's because I always get carried away trying to record exactly what's in front of me. So today I tried to focus less on the exact colours and more on just getting the feeling of the lighting right. It turned out much better for it. I must remember that in future!

Rainy Day

2010-06-06T20:37:00.003Z

As it was raining last weekend I opted for painting the view from my window!

White, with an accent of white

2010-05-25T21:21:00.003Z

I went shopping for some new tennis trainers recently. I came home very disappointed.

Sometimes it sucks being a girl

Sunny Days :-)

2010-05-23T13:28:00.004Z

What fantastic weather!! So naturally, out came the paints! I went with gouache this time, it was good fun but it'll take a bit of getting used to. Whereas with acrylic is easy for things to get too dark too quickly, with gouache it seemed to be the opposite. I was actually struggling to get my darks dark enough. I don't usually use black from a tube but I may have to, I'll see.

I spent a couple of hours on the first one. For the second on I only had an hour so it's not really finished.

Lunchtime sketch

2010-04-20T16:20:00.000Z

Poor trolleys...

2010-02-10T22:12:00.002Z

I passed lots of miss placed trolleys on my bike home, I felt a bit sad for them.

I tried to experiment a bit here with my colours. As I love observing natural lighting I'm always painting with realistic colour palettes, so I thought it'd be good to try something a more stylised.

I tried to be a bit bolder in the colours I used and more constrained with the overall palette. I don't think I've achieved a stylised look as such, but I quite like the result anyway. It was interesting to do.

Real Paint!

2010-02-02T23:47:00.002Z

I'm doing a few sessions down in Bournemouth again this month. So over the next few weeks I'm going to be focusing on real paint rather than the digital stuff, which makes a nice change.

I find that Teaching is such a great way of learning, it really makes you analyse what you do and why you do it. It's easy to get lazy when you just do stuff for yourself and not really learn as much as you could from it. So it's great to be doing these sessions!

Yesterday we had fun experimenting with mark making and creating textures. Below are the examples I did (done in acrylic paint).

Back to Blogging!

2010-01-25T20:26:00.004Z

This poor blog has been neglected of late, but all that's about to change. For now, here are some sketches from my Paris trip last November...

Portsmouth

2009-05-31T21:30:00.003Z

Watching the boats go by...

2009-05-31T21:27:00.000Z

London

2009-02-26T10:09:00.002Z

Sketching

2009-02-18T22:02:00.004Z

Went to London sketching today with Tim and Iain. After a bit of a slow start at the British Museum we moved out onto the streets to get away from all the people (half term see), and it turned out to be a really good day. Had really good fun doing the long ones over two pages! It's good to see the Chinatown one scanned in actually, because it was a bit hard to see if it was working in my sketchbook, but digital it actually looks alright! Was good fun playing with markers for the London skyline too.

Mini crawl

2009-01-17T21:08:00.003Z

Did my own mini sketch crawl today round Guildford this afternoon :-) It was a bit chilly!

SketchCrawl

2009-01-12T10:44:00.005Z

Iain and I joined the SketchCrawl this weekend. We went round a couple of museums, it being too cold to draw outside. It was really good. It's been a long time since I've sketched! I was trying to copy some sketching styles I'd seen from other peoples blog, but it didn't really work, this is pretty much just how I sketch! It's going to take some practice. Good to have made a start though.

Update

2009-01-09T17:15:00.002Z

This is the matte painting so far. I've blocked in all the main elements and roughly colour matched stuff. Now I need to work into more detail and correct the areas where colour and lighting aren't working and try to get the scene working as a whole as well as all the individual elements. At this stage I think it could look a lot worse! So, I'm pretty happy with how it's progressing so far.

Matte Painting

2008-12-09T17:27:00.002Z

I've been meaning to do this for a while but I'm finally getting round to it; I'm going to do a matte painting! I'm going to keep it pretty simple to start with. I'm going to take one of my photos from Japan and comp it into a simple scene and make it snowy! Below is the colour key I've done to work out the basic composition and lighting of the scene, and beneath that is the photo I'm taking as my starting point. I'll post my progress.

2008-11-24T23:43:00.000Z

More pastels...

2008-10-25T14:07:00.002Z

This week we did a portrait.

Life drawing

2008-10-14T10:08:00.002Z

Just started a life drawing course a couple of weeks ago. Here's last evening's effort. I've not used pastles for life drawing before. I really enjoyed it. A lot of it ended up over worked but I learnt a lot doing it. Hopefully I'll get anoter chance to use them in the course.

Hello!

2008-08-11T16:17:00.001Z

Went drawing at the weekend with my funky friend Alex. Here's what we did!

A colour doodle...

2008-03-26T22:56:00.002Z

Weekend Pastel

2007-08-28T17:38:00.001Z

Life drawing

2007-07-31T22:13:00.000Z

So here's my work from the life drawing course. It's not all of it, I did an oil painting on the last day but I had to leave it there to dry, so that will follow. I'm quite critical looking back at some of these, but at the same time not too worried. The main thing for me was the learning I went through throughout the week. It's done my confidence in drawing the world of good :-)

Swansea

2007-07-30T17:54:00.000Z

Quite an arty couple of weeks! Last week I went to Swansea with the intention to do lots of plien air painting but thanks to the great British summer we're having it was cut a bit shot. I still managed to get 2 good days of painting though. The week previous to that I spent at Lavender Hill studios doing a life drawing/painting course, which was excellent. I haven't got digital images of the life drawing yet so for now I've just go the landscape stuff.

I tried a few times to use pastel. I'm still having a few issues with them but this was probably the most successful of them.

This is an old one of Guildford I thought I'd just tag on the end. I got in a fed up with it when I was doing it but now I look back at it there's something I quite like about it.

Weekend pastel

2007-06-04T16:05:00.000Z

Here's a pastel I did in the park this weekend. I was struggling to differentiate the distant hills from the trees in the foreground. I think I need to buy myself a few more muted colour pastels to help with this. I really enjoyed doing it though!

Lavener Hill Studios

2007-05-13T13:11:00.000Z

For the last few weeks, I've been attending an evening class at the studio where Tim is currently studying. The studio is a great place and really nice place to go and spend an evening. It feels very welcoming and they're very supportive of your development (not like the last evening class I went to where after having been attending for 4 or 5 weeks the tutor asked if I was new to the class)! I'm really enjoying it and I also think it's doing my drawing a lot of good. The main focus is on accuracy of proportion, something which I'd noticed I was getting very lasy with.

Below is the result of my 4th lesson, where I sat in on a portrait session. I really enjoyed it. I'm not sure that I've quite got the likeness but nevertheless it's a fairly solid looking head so in that respect I'm quite pleased!

More Painting

2007-04-16T17:50:00.000Z

A quick painting I did at the weekend. I think it works ok in thubnail size, but when you look at it closer the tones and hues are a bit samey. I over cooked it a bit at the end too, I couldn't leave it alone! I should have left it half an hour before I did. Good learning though.

Paris

2007-04-11T16:53:00.000Z

Guildford

2007-03-19T09:39:00.000Z

Some colour stuff I did at the weekend. I tried using watercolour from tubes mixed with white gouache, as this is the combination Nathan Fowkes uses, so I thought I'd give it a whirl. It worked pretty well, especially for working outside. I found the combination a bit more forgiving than using just gouache, which I've never really gotten the hang of! And it obviously doesn't dry out like acrylic.

Morning..

Afternoon...

Self Portrait Continued...

2007-02-12T23:41:00.000Z

This evening's sitting

Self Portrait

2007-02-11T22:20:00.000Z

No posts for a while due to the fact I've been lazy, but hey here we are a new burst of life. I thought I'd try a portrait in oils just for fun. I've never really painted in oils much so it's a bit of an experiment. I might keep it quite monochrome so as not to bite off too much in my first attempt. I'll see how it goes. Here are the first two stages.

Waterloo/Southbank

2006-10-18T16:29:00.000Z

We were in Waterloo last night. Here are my efforts in the order I did them.

I decided Iwas getting a bit tight after this first one so I decided to losen up a bit and just have a bit of fun.

As you can see I took great care with the elipses of the Millenium wheel...

....and with the finer details of Westminster!

One Lombard

2006-10-06T09:06:00.000Z

The City by Night

2006-10-02T09:58:00.000Z

I've just started an evening class on Tuesdays, 'Drawing the City by Night'. Here's my most successfull attempt from last week, drawing around Southbank. Tomorrow we're drawing in a restaurant kitchen, which should be interesting. I'll let you know how we get on!

Bad Day at Work

2006-08-17T08:46:00.000Z

After another uninspiring day at work yesterday, I thought rather than go home to complain about it to my housemate, as I usually do, I'd actually do something about it. So I went outside and tried doing a pastel of the Samsung building across the way. It was good fun.

By this point I was thinking more about the roast dinner waiting for me at home (yes, I officially have the best housemate ever)!

Natural History Museum

2006-08-15T17:49:00.000Z

We were planning a trip to the zoo again this weekend but the weather didn't allow it so we ended up at the Natural History Museum instead. I did this drawing over 2 visits. Naturally I thought this would be fine, as I wasn't drawing anything that was likely to move overnight, how naive of me! Well, they moved the dinosaur and kindly placed a sign post right in front of the spot I'd been drawing from the day before. How they quite managed to moved the dinosaur I'm not quite sure as it's pretty big and pretty bolted to the floor! I can only conclude that they do in fact come to life and walk about at night.

Anyway back to my drawing! I'm please I've done it! It's a long time since I've done a sustained drawing like that. However, I feel I need to work on the tonal balance within my drawings. It gets a bit confusing in places and I think there are too many similar tones in it, but I'm pleased with it as a starting point.

Some Old Stuff

2006-08-15T16:54:00.000Z

A cheap trick to fill space on my blog I know, but I though I'd post some of my old stuff up here. Besides, it's only old to me! Here are a few backgrounds I did for my final year film at college in Bournemouth.

In our second year of college we all got the chance to go abroad to do a work placement at an animation studio. I went to San Sebastian in the Basque region in Spain.

London Zoo

2006-07-11T12:19:00.000Z

Went to the zoo at the weekend! It was much bigger than I expected, they've got all types of animals. I didn't have time to look round them all so expect another visit soon!

Lifedrawing

2006-04-10T17:10:00.000Z

These are some drawings from my lifedrawing class other week. I really enjoyed the session for the first time in ages. For the past six months I've been struggling with lifedrawing, but I seem to have broken through my mental block and I'm enjoying it again now! I was pleased with the volume in these drawings, but I think my lines could be a bit more descriptive of weight and tortion. At the momnet the pressure of the line is quite even all the way around the figures, particularly in the bottom two.

2006-04-05T17:23:00.000Z

Hello!