Lotta Love

Lotta Love, Acrylic on canvas, Aprox 35cmx40cm

This is Lotta Love for the Sisters series, all done and dusted. It goes with the 'The Ning-A-Nings' image of her little sister.

Driving along, or sometimes walking on Lotta Road, this little grandgirl would dance or run along the road singing her favourite songs, among them, Neil Young's song: 'It's gonna take a lot of love to change the way things are ... It's gonna take a lot of love and we won't get to far... but if you look in my di-ection and we don't see eye to eye, my heart needs alating and so do I...'
  
Her favourite Ning-A-Ning (guinea pig) was Lola.

 The Ning-A-Nings

Another completed painting for the Sisters series. Still working on the one of her sister (see previous posts).

Acrylic on canvas,
Approx 35cm x 40cm.

Incomplete, but almost there. Another two in the 'Sisters' series. These will be called 'Ning-a-Nings' as the younger sister used to call the guinea pigs. Still trying to achieve a simpler and looser approach to application of paint. The younger child image achieves this better, but got a way to go to loosening up.

The Grandgirls: drawings

blue, black and red pen on tissue paper - now to work out how to frame them.
About A4 size.

The Grandgirls: Sisters

 

d) The final cut. Took ages to come back to and finish. Still a bit tight, but working on freeing up more with three new ones I've started. 

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I wanted to be able to paint a picture in a day - here is its progress from early this morning.

I am hoping to complete it by tonight. My aim is to free up how I apply paint and capture more of the essence and feel of the subject, whilst in portraits at least, still maintaining a good likeness. 

I am pleased with how this one is working. Sometimes things come together unexpectedly. 

Sisters, acrylic on canvas, 40cm x 30cm (Started 27-11-2015)

a) 

b) 

c)

When the Cows Come Home No.2

I was not happy with the original composition of my cows painting; the tree I put in at the last minute, which is actually in the real scene, just broke it up and stopped the flow of the lines - bands - of colour. I scratched the tree out the other day, painted over it, and painted the first poor cow's head back in, like I originally had it. 
Sometimes you just need to do something, look at it for a while and then change it. I'm a lot happier with it now. Still a bit tight, but working on that...

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I started this one 2 weekends ago while painting "The Picnic / Walk' (see previous post) which I am going to leave now for a while as I it seems I have come to a bit of an impasse with how to tie the background in with the figures.
In this painting I wanted to be able to say "...And here's one I did today!" But it went on a bit longer than that. It is an experiment in freedom and loosness (so to speak), which succeeded to some degree, but still is a bit 'tight' and more realistic than I'd hoped, with me trying (to hard?) to balance detail with more abstract qualities, like bands of colour and shapes. I think I need to try another one using the same subject matter, and concentrate on colour and shapes more, this time working on a larger scale - and not think about it so much. I'm still happy enough with it - the colours kind of work well.

It is only about 18cm x 12cm. Most of my posted recent work is around this size.

At the moment I am trying to make my leaky, no-walled, non-possum-proof shed into a studio of sorts so I can work on larger scale pieces, instead of only working in my smaller indoor space. So here's hoping my next painting is bigger and looser and freer!
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Here are some close ups of some of the figures from the previous painting, which I will leave on the back burner for now.

My lack of camera skills have left these all looking a bit blurred!

The Picnic: work in progress

a.

b.

c.

d.                        Latest incarnation of 'The Picnic', perhaps to be renamed, 'The Walk'

e.                     Getting there; figures need completing and still to decide on the background.