paintings prints and stuff

  Cat carving and cardoon by lamplight, coloured pencil in A3 moleskine Still looking at the items on the shelf above the tv but moving them around on paper, rearranging and looking at pattern and colour.  They aren't in the positions I've drawn them in at all and I've simply used the colour of the vase, though lightening it, not wanting the vase itself explained.  The same with the wheat and hearts patterns.  Warm light from the lamp and the cool lavender shades are observed so that the whole thing hangs together. Below are the earlier stages as it evolved.  I only have a rough idea of the final piece when doing this, unlike a traditional set up, where everything is where it will be in the image.   It evolves as I go.  Major elements like the cat carving, cardoon, blue of the vase and the honesty are decided immediately - they are the skeleton that everything hangs on.   Decisions about depth of tone, lost edges, patterns of wheat and the hearts and scrolls,

Study for a larger work, coloured pencil in A4 moleskine, honesty It's cold, very very windy and raining cats and dogs.   I'm lucky that we aren't affected by the terrible floods affecting large areas of the county but I still don't want to go out in it!  So I'm continuing to look at still life, a subject that I rarely do as a finished painting, preferring to do occasional studies of things that interest me and concentrating mainly on landscape. The items on the shelf over the tv, lit by a table lamp caught my eye - a vase of honesty, wheat stalks and a large cardoon head, a carved wooden cat, some carved abstract birds on a tree, the lamp and a bright pottery cat.  So .... how to make a different arrangement of them? playing with colour and pattern, not simply doing them ' as is ', which didn't interest me. Switching the lamp on gave wonderful colour contrasts, the shadows having a positive lavender colour and the highlights a warm amber.  Lig