Plough horse oil painting

This year has been tough - lots of long hours at work and other commitments that have meant I was not able to do as much art work as I would have liked.

One piece that has being running since April is this plough horse.

 

It started out as an exercise and I was going to use acrylics.

I have not worked with them much but  liked the idea of being able to layer the paints quickly.

I used a couple of photo references for this - the main one was in black and white.  The sketch used that composition.  

20 march 2011

I sketched in pencil and  I should have spent some time getting this right but I didn't.  Next time .........

The next thing I did was started blocking in colour. This was in acrylic.

It was at his point I realised how massive the area was and how much effort it was going to take to make this work. 

 I stopped at here.  

When I returned to work on it I had decided to switch to oils.  

I chipped away at it for April and blocked in all the colour.  I worked on landscape behind. 

05 May 2011

Next I started to work on the furrows.  As it was such a big canvas I didn't want to get into too much detail.  I marked the lines out then defined

11 MAY 2011

 

25 MAY 2011

When all other detail was added I went in and added the harness and shadows.

I added a pale wash to push the landscape and sky back and that was it.

03  June 2011

As ever learned alot on this-I should do more prep and make more decisive decisions as I work.  

 

Firefighter

A quick effort sketching a firefighter.

Dog portrait

With some time off for Easter - two bank holiday weekends - I took a short camping trip. I also ended up dog sitting. Unusually the time off conincided with some unseasonably warm and dry weather. We treked in the Connemara National Park. If your visiting this part of the world do try to make your way there.
This was a photo I took of the dog after a little Photoshopping.

This image is how it started out.

Easter Bunny

Lolling Lizard

I  have kept working on the vectors and choose a lizard as the next unwilling victim.  I ended up with very much the same colour scheme as the last one but it was not intentional.

Lolling Lizard

Spring Sheep

Last Sunday was the first really spring day I got to enjoy. There may have been some earlier but as I work in a room with no windows I may have missed some. 

The fields were full of sheep and their lambs in sunshine. One of those days when it is just great being there.

Animation Shorts

The creation of an animation short is an interesting exercise.  Gone are the days when the cartoon was played alongside feature films in cinemas.  Instead these creations don't really have a readily recognisable forum or stage where they can find wide exposure. 

The form itself is interesting as it is usually the work of just a small group of people or maybe just one brave soul like students creating course work or a professional looking to explore personal boundaries.

This can mean that the vision is less likely to be diluted and daring it its execution.

The Internet has provided a place to show off these creations with some finding fame on the likes of You Tube.

An example of a personal project is Ryan Woodward used his considerable  gesture drawing skill  taking it to produce an evocative piece of animation The Thought of You.  There are more details on the process on his site http://conteanimated.com/

Thought of You from Ryan J Woodward on Vimeo.

This animation was created as a video for an Australian group the Audreys song Sometimes The Stars.


Sometimes the Stars from The Audreys on Vimeo.


There is an interview with  the director Ari Gibson and art director Jason Pamment here

Out of Sight   was  a graduation project by Yu Ya-ting, Yeh Ya-hsuan and Chung Ling from the Department of Multimedia and Animation Art at National Taiwan University of Arts.  It is a hand drawn imagining of the world perceived a blind girl.

Mapping St Patrick

One of the great things about the growth in digitisation of library and museum collections means that the collections can be browsed without travel and material that even if you made that journey may not be available to the general public.  

As St Patricks Day arrives (17 March) I thought it might be a good time to look at the mapping of Ireland what could be found online .  The earlier maps were drawn with little real geographical knowledge and were therefore prone to bias and perhaps exaggeration of a locations size to match its perceived importance. 

The earliest map of the British Isles is the Mappa Munde dated 1025-1050, available in the British Library  collection. 

Ireland - an undistinguished blob- but mapped nonetheless.

Also in the British Library collection is this map on vellum from the 1530s.  This has some  rudimentary coastal detail.  What it lacks in detail it makes up for in character with some nice illustration. 

This map in the British Library collection dated in the mid 1500s has more detail with lakes, rivers, mountains and Islands.  

This map does mark the location of St Patricks purgatory (marked St Patrick).

In the Library of Congress collection are some later maps showing the growing accuracy of mapping.  This map dates from 1598 and also marks St Patricks purgatory in Lough Derg. 

 And this on this map Loug Derg and St Patricks purgatory are marked together. 

St Patricks Purgatory was and remains an important site of pilgrimage.  

This is how it appears on google maps today. 

You have to look hard to find it!

Happy St Patricks Day !

Siberian Wooden Houses

This is a  picture of a wooden house in Siberia.  This was taken by Vlad Gerasimov who lives in the city of Irkutsk which is situated North of the border with Mongolia and close to the largest fresh water lake in the world, Lake Baikal (20% of the world's surface fresh water that is unfrozen).  This one of a large number of images available on a site dedicated to these houses.

Also included is a short tutorial on creating these High Dynamic Range (HDR) photos.

I recommend checking out Vlads other site which has some great illustrations and downloads.

Luttrell Salter Illustrations

The Lutrell Salter is a book produced in 1320-1325. A psalter is a collection of religious texts. These texts were usually heavily illuminated.

The Lutrell Salter was owned by Sir Geoffrey Luttrell (1276-1345) an English nobleman.

The British Library has a copy of this text available online which has a nifty zoom function.

The illustrations in this text carry moral messages to keep the reader on the straight and narrow but also depict folk in everyday activities such as ploughing and feeding livestock. The images are thought to be by a few illustrators