Art & Design Foundation Stage 1

For my Swimming Pool piece for Newport Museum, I will be painting an image from underwater photographs I have taken. My intention is to layer the image over 4 sheets of glass. As such, I need to do some research into painting on glass. The intention is to paint on the reverse of the glass, so the paint is protected. This means that the image will need to be reversed and painted from foreground to background, rather than the usual background to foreground. I found this demonstration by glass artist Richard Rowan: Richard Rowan There is much to take from this video - how he applies the paint and how he makes adjustments by putting the glass on a stand so that he can see the image from the 'right side'. The use of palette knife and fingers to apply the paint and the layering of colours, sometimes left to dry for crisp edges, sometimes when wet so that you can blend them. He paints thickly using oils on one single sheet of glass, however as I am thinking of doing 4 laye...

Today in digital art we have been manipulating images to reflect the art movements we researched a couple of weeks ago. My first image is intended to reflect the Art Deco movement. It is symmetrical, geometrical shapes forming a mosaic or stained glass. My second image is representative of pop art - a simplified, comic-style image in a reduced colour palette. My third image has elements of impressionism - the focus of this one is on the light reflecting on the surface of the water and the effect of the light reflections on the skin.

Today I learned how to create the image below using Illustrator:  I learned how to group and separate images, add shadows and outlines and select colours.  link to tutorial

I started writing this post while I was on holiday, but I only had my phone with me & typing a blog post from my phone turned out to be a nightmare! So a little later than planned, here goes: Cambridge Our first stop was Cambridge, where I had hoped to visit Kettles Yard Gallery, but it was closed for refurbishment.  We did have a lovely day admiring the architecture of all the colleges though and we visited the Fitzwilliam Museum. It was good to see a couple of Monet's works that I hadn't seen before, one of which was a seascape - very apt for our topic of World of Water. Not my favourite I have to say - I find the composition very odd with the top of the cliff being level with the horizon - if I had painted it I would have moved so that the line was staggered from my point of perspective, but hey - I'm not Monet & who am I to judge him?! Rocks at Port-Coton, the Lion Rock, Belle-Ile, 1886 - Claude Monet It was fascinating to see it close up t...

I first came across the idea of shaving my oil pastels from an article by Karen Margulis: http://kemstudios.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/try-new-pastel-technique.html And she got the idea from Bill Creevy who discusses the technique in his book "The Pastel Book". Apparently it is a technique used by Degas. She also shares a link to this post by Richard McKinley: http://www.artistsnetwork.com/articles/art-demos-techniques/pastel-pointers-the-technique-of-dusting She uses soft pastels and I couldn't get it to work - the powder just didn't stick for me no matter what I tried. So then I thought well if I can't get soft pastel dust to stick, then maybe if I use sticky oil pastels I will have more success. And I did! First, I rubbed oil pastel over the paper to create a base for the shavings to stick to, then I shaved lots of colours to create a sand-like effect, squashing them into the base layer by placing a clear plastic sheet on top & rubbing. I then...