More watercolours from colour studies inspired by a visit to Turner and the Sea at the National Maritime Museum, another exhibition and a random album cover.
Still
on the blue and grey theme, and still remembering Turner's seascapes,
here with some sun added. Cadmium yellow, that would be.
I loved a large scale Biggs and Collings painting at the London Art Fair. Flickering complementary colours, stark geometry, lots of greys. I immediately wanted to include it all.
For the next page, an album cover caught my eye on Spotify. Can't even remember what is was. Point is, inspiration finds me once I drop into a groove.
The first week in January.
A tricky place, sometimes, with self initiated work. Opening the watercolour box, filling up the water jars, facing a blank page again after the long break.
This year, I began with binding my own sketchbook. Slicing, stitching and gluing paper and card felt do-able and very, very satisfying. I get to determine the format - square and smallish felt good.
This is a great DVD on simple bookbinding from Shepherds, paper and bookbinding specialists in London.
I knew I wanted to start off with colour studies, since I had been inspired by a visit to see Turner and the Sea at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.
Many of Turner's late, very elemental and rough, more experimental pieces were on show. To my eye, those were some of the most interesting and wow pieces in the exhibition. Pieces which were not originally intended for exhibition, actually, they were private explorations and notes.
I looked and looked at the greys he is so famous for, and at the huge tonal range.
Back in my studio I'm loving finding the varied greys, hunting for the full range of tonal values using just a few colours and coming back again and again to the same thing in a meditative way.
The blank page has become an invitation, and I can't wait to finish one spread and start the next each day.
Sometimes it's good to play with a theme. Stripes.
This time in watercolour and cut paper strips, inspired by an Ikat robe from Uzbekistan that I saw at an exhibition at the V&A ages ago (more of my experiments with stripes live here). I do love an Ikat weave a lot, always the subtle blending of colours and the mystery of the rhythms in the warp and weft.
I have been sorting out my portfolio and getting work further out to the world, which is all very well, but there still has to be time to have fun with colour and brushes, right? In fact, it's essential.
Sometimes I start a small warm up painting without knowing where I'm going, just colour, line and sometimes a pattern if something emerges. This small study on lovely thick paper has been knocking around the studio for a bit, and I've grown to love aspects of it. I hope something similar shows up in my more formal, structured illustration work sometime.
