Week 11. The start of new painting!

This week i started a new painting.  I am really into dramatic skies at the moment!  The dark hues against the bright vivid colours are really exciting!  I scumbled in the sky with a glaze and then put the horizon and trees in with a brush.  Interestingly i painted the trees in roughly as i will then be painting in the negative space around them later.  This will allow me to achieve more refined, finer branches rather than trying to paint them in with a tiny brush!  So i will have to think backwards for that one, i can't wait!  Unfortunately  i will have to wait though as it was the final week of my creative oil painting course this week but i have enjoyed it that much, i have signed up for next term!

The scene is starting to take shape

Llandudno Painting for sale

My Llandudno oil painting is for sale and available to buy through my website www.christineheyworth.co.uk

For sizes and price please go to my "flowers, landscapes & seascapes" page of my web site and "contact me and commissions" page for contact and delivery details.

View of the painting on the wall and close up detail of the artwork.  Please note that all my canvases are delivered ready to hang.

Week 10. The Northern Lights are finished!

It's week 10 of my oil painting course and my second painting "Northern Lights" is finished!  I just had to brighten the moon once more, add a bit more light to the lights themselves and the fun part - spattering in the stars!!  It was brilliant fun getting my toothbrush out and spattering white paint onto my painting, the sky just came alive! I am so pleased with my painting, it is going to take pride and place by the Christmas tree over the festive period.

The finished piece!  As you can see this pic is hot off the press as it is still wet in parts!

The spattering technique is really effective for creating stars!

Tigerprint Christmas Carousel

My Christmas tree forest design is on the Tigerprint home page and i was the first one on there!  Check my design out as it goes round the carousel!

Tigerprint home page

The words "We Are Tigerprint" had to be used in the design.

Coming together at Christmas competition

Here are my entries for the Tigerprint Christmas Competition.  The brief is to think about the things that give you that Christmas moment.  So here's mine!

Santa, wrapping presents, hanging stockings, playing in the snow and kissing under the mistletoe.  That sums up Christmas for me!

Week 9 - It's all coming together nicely!

The northern lights are nearly complete!  I wowed everyone on my course this week by pulling my painting together with the trees in the foreground and the detail in the snow.  I have even amazed myself!  I did the usual trick of sitting too closely to the painting, thinking i was making a mess but was pleasantly surprised when i saw it on the shelf at the end of the class!  It has a lovely glow about it which is what i wanted to achieve and hopefully after next weeks class it will have even more highlights of colour to it and some lovely glowing stars too.  I also learned that the technique i have been using to soften the colours and outlines of my painting by covering the areas with a semiopaque colour with my rag is called scumbling!  I think that might be my new favourite word, it makes me smile!

A lovely snowy image just in time for Christmas!

Christmas Crafts!

Seeing as December is just around the corner, i decided to get my Christmas Decoration craft book out this afternoon and start making some decorations ready to trim the house up!  Here are what i've made so far!  I will take more pics when i've decorated my studio up with them.

Colourful Llandudno

I have given my Llandudno painting the Kuler treatment and picked out the basic colours in the artwork.  The colours work beautifully together!

Colour, Colour, Colour!

I have just discovered a great website for creating colour palettes!  It is also brilliant for finding new combinations of colour too!  The website is called Adobe Kuler and i have my account on there which i will be building up with lots of nice colour combinations.  The site allows you to download colour palettes as an Adobe swatch exchange file so that the colours can be added to your colour palette in Adobe applications.  Here is my first one together with the painting.

I put this board together myself as the site only saves the palette and not the photograph with it.

Week 8. The Northern light get brighter!

There's only a small difference this week but i'm getting there!  I had the rags out again smoothing and blending my glaze to get that transparent, mystical look.  The sky is coming together nicely now and the lights themselves are becoming brighter the more i apply layers of paint.  The trick is to not let my nice clean bright colours become contaminated on the palette or it could dull the whole thing!  I have reflected the mauve colours out of the sky into the snow too, bringing the painting together.  I'm enjoying taking my time over this painting, it's so relaxing and is going to be amazing when finished!

That sun is becoming really bright now and the greens in the lights becoming more vivid.

Wax Attack!

I have had soooo much fun this afternoon trying out this new craze of melting wax crayons to create art!  I kept my step son totally in the dark about what i was doing and it was worth it just to see the surprise and excitement as the wax started to melt!  He instantly wanted to do one of his own, so i gave him a mini canvas to work on and he loved it!  Just look at our wonderful creations below!

This my canvas.  I arranged the colours in a rainbow taking out the blacks and greys and glued them on with my glue gun.  It took 3 packs of 24 crayons to fit along the 20" width of my canvas (I had to dip into a 4th pack to add a few of the colours i liked best!).

I stood my canvas up and put lots of card on the floor to protect it as the wax flies quite a distance once you get going! Once you apply the heat of the hair drier the wax begins to melt and drip down the canvas.

My finished piece of Crayola art!  I love it!  I love the little splash marks amongst all the drips!  The great thing about this is, although lots of people are doing it, every one of them is unique!

This is my step son starting his masterpiece!  Luckily the colours i left out of my canvas are his favourites so he has used the browns and blacks here!

The finished piece!  He is so pleased and proud of it so it is going to take pride and place on his bedroom wall!

Both canvases together!  Just look how different they are!  Brilliant, have a go!

The First Cut

I had a lovely day today walking around the Manchester Art Gallery at a must see exhibition called The First Cut.  It holds the work of 31 contemporary artists who cut, sculpt and manipulate paper into works of art, and it was totally amazing!  I initially went as i knew that some of the works by Rob Ryan were going to be there, but i was totally overwhelmed by the art of all the artists there.  I took a few snaps to share with you so please enjoy.  I would definitely recommend you visit though if you can, the exhibition is on until 27th January 2013!

Week 7 - The Northern Lights take shape!

My new painting is coming together nicely to say that left to my own devices last week i didn't make the best of starts!  My lines were too horizontal and i should have left white where the bright green streaks should go.  But with a little help, i managed to pull it back!  I also left the paintbrushes behind this week and painted with rags instead!  This enabled me to get rid of any brush marks.  By painting in a circular motion with the rag it allowed me to achieve a nice smooth atmospheric film which is associated with the northern lights.  You learn something new every day!  Everyone in class was impressed with the start i made.  I think this is going to be one beautiful painting!

The sky was painted with rags and the snow with a paintbrush to achieve the difference in surfaces.

Colours in the snow reflect the sky.  I'm looking forward to getting the trees in!

The sky painted in rags. This needs another glaze over the top as you can still see those horizontal lines!

It's Christmas Again!

I've been back on the Christmas card designing.  This time it's a heart shaped Christmas wreath for the one you love!

Heart wreath is available from The Paintbox

Tigerprint Hand Drawn Type Competition Entries

Here are my entries into the Tigerprint competition.  I enjoyed getting all my art stuff out again and having a day of experimenting with techniques!  Some of these techniques took me right back to childhood.  Brilliant fun!

"Bees Knees" - Pencil crayon and pen

"Butterfly" - Acrylic paint and cad

"Hip Hip Hooray - Watercolour paint and pencil

"Star" - Wax Crayon and watercolour paint

"Super Duper" - Watercolour paint and ink

The beginning of something beautiful!

Here is a little insight into my next painting.  I started it this week but have only just managed to block out the shapes.  Next week will be fun.  I can't wait to properly get started on this one!

The beautiful Northern Lights!  I'd love to see them myself one day!

Week 6! Llandudno is complete!!

Well it's taken 6 weeks (a record long time for me) but the moment is finally here when i can reveal to you the finished painting "Llandudno"!  This week i decided that the hills furthest away needed knocking back and that the sea was too rough!  So using the wash techniques i learnt on the course, i set to work and finished it.  The great thing about oils is that if you put a thin wash over the top of already dried paint you can reveal what is underneath with out destroying it!  You can get lovely transparencies.  I am so proud of my first ever oil painting!  See what you think!

Llandudno

A nice calm sea with a bit of the old paint showing through underneath to give the water movement.

Soft brush strokes give soft focus while harsher brush strokes add detail.

I Phone Case Designs

I have entered four of my designs into an I phone case competition! Check out my entries below and at:  http://iconemesisloveillustration.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/christine-heyworth.html

Oops!!

Sorry for those waiting to see the development of my painting.  I totally forgot to take a photo this week!  I was having so much fun in this weeks lesson that i got carried away talking to my class mates and discussing each others paintings!  The painting is almost finished, i just have a few tweaks to do next week and then i'll be starting my new work of art!  How exciting!!

Seeing as i don't have a nice picture for you, here's a spooky one of our little family of pumpkins from Halloween! Mwa ha ha ha!!

Daddy, Step Mum and Son captured in the pumpkin form ready for spooking!!

9 Weeks till Christmas!

I have been back on the Christmas card designing this week and really enjoying it!

Christmas cards for the paintbox

Busy week at Tigerprint!

With 679 entries into the black and white print competition on Tigerprint, they have been having a busy week judging!  And it's been a busy time for me and my designs too.  I was over the moon when my "Bird" entry got a mention on the Tigerprint competition Facebook page!  But then yesterday i was pleasantly surprised that my "Circle" design has made it into the top 25 entries!!  The winner will be announced on Monday but i'm just delighted that my designs are liked!

Mention for my "Birds" design.

My shortlisted design (Fingers Crossed!!)

Week 4!

I can't believe this is week 4 of my oil painting course!  I would have completed an acrylic painting by now, but as this is all new to me and there are loads of interesting techniques to use with oils, my painting is still incomplete!  I'm still really enjoying it though!  This week i concentrated on the foreground of my painting and got some handy hints for how not to overwork the foreground (which is the direction it was going in before my tutor intervened!) just by using soft delicate brushstrokes to give the appearance of detail rather than making it look too sharp and distracting to the eye!   I'm still not happy with the water or background yet so once the foreground is in i am going to revisit the top of my painting and set some parts even further back.  Unfortunately with it being half term next week you will have to wait two weeks to see the next development!

Black and White Prints

These are my Tigerprint competition entries.  "Birds" was actually one of my screen print designs for a scarf project at college.  I think it works perfectly for the theme!

"Paisley" - Computer generated design

"Trellis - Computer generated design

"Snake" - Computer generated design

"Birds" - Screen print scarf design

"Circles" - Pencil sketch

I love Oil Painting!!

Yes,  I think I'm slowly being converted to the ways of the oils!  This art course is the best thing i could have done in order to better myself as an artist as i am learning all kinds of magical and crazy techniques!  This week i was shown how to knock back the background of my painting using equal amounts of linseed oil with sansodor and then putting slight amounts of colour over the top, creating a glaze!  Amazing, it was like magic!  And the beauty is if i didn't like it i could wipe it off with a cloth and my original paint was still underneath!  I am also really pleased as my teacher likened my work to pointillism!!  As a lover of Georges Seurat's work this has pleased me very much! See what you think...