Blog

I print with all kinds of interesting found objects, and I do have a few favourites, like egg cartons and cardboard packaging, that I like to use to create prints on my gel plate. But having started on a new painting I found I was looking for some prints with a more organic feel, rather than geometric patterns or structured designs. So I turned to our veggie patch, which is unashamedly sprouting lots of lovely weeds at the moment, including a kind of marsh grass which turned

My sketches have taken a bit of a back seat this month with all my time and energy going into finishing my bigger paintings. But I've had 'muted colour' on my mind as we've been working our way through various colour exercises at the Tinbeerwah Art Group. So with some paint leftover on my palette I decided to ask myself, what happens if I mute or de-saturate all the colours in a sketch?

I spent a wonderful morning with the Oils & Acrylics painting group at Wallace House exploring 'Space' as our Element of Art and 'Focus' as our Principle of Design. We explored positive and negative space and two different ways we can create focal points and areas of emphasis in abstract art, with colour and contrast placement. Check out our album from the morning - I think I may have a few collage converts on my hands!

I'm still adding to my growing collection of colour sketches on paper. I started to see organic shapes in this sketch from the very beginning which informed the way it turned out! A fair bit of colour play without any particular direction in mind beyond starting with blue, pinks and a green.

I had another go at starting with a black background with this little 30 x 30 cm canvas board along with pieces of bright collage paper, some of which had found their way into the early layers of my bigger paintings. Most of the little cutout circles and semi-circles were ones I had lying around, leftover from previous snippings, so I was really just using up what I had to hand.

I started this sketch thinking I'd have another go with violet and green - but as you'll see after much indecision I ended up making pink the dominant colour, hence the title. It took me a while to tune into this sketch and I had a little wrestle with details - too much too soon, so lots of covering up and some big collage pieces to the rescue! Some interesting new shapes and ideas did emerge by the end though which may carry forward into something bigger.