Ten days without posting...

I have been out of town quite a lot and am now teaching (last week and this). I was in the Coromandel again last week, and took many pictures. The tractors are on the beach at Hahei, and the birds were at the marina in Whitianga. Unfortunately I wasn't able to take shots early or late in the day so the bright light meant not a lot of my photographs turned out very well, particularly the beach and water.

At school we did some printmaking. The students did prints using a thin board instead of lino. It worked very well. The students planned their design on paper first, then drew it onto board before cutting. A couple of them spent a lot of time carefully cutting lots of detail and their's worked very well. Most of the children (Years 5 and 6) were so keen to get to the printing bit that they rushed - we had butterflies, a boy with fishing rod and bucket of fish, a couple of landscapes, a hand, and animals. The first print was in one colour and for the second (the boards dried quickly in the sun) they chose two colours (they'd done colour mixing recently with their regular teacher). Some rolled the ink until it totally blended and others tried with some success to have two colours blending into each other. They're mounted on coloured paper and up on the wall and look great.

and more visual diary stuff ...

Playing in the visual diary

Little Fish

Taken with my Canon digital SLR at Port Charles near the top of the Coromandel. I might have this one printed. I have adjusted the levels and contrast a little.

Drawing

Some figure drawing in black ink in my journal - did a few in charcoal on large paper but haven't photographed them. These are 15 second and 30 second gesture and I think 1 and 2 minute drawings, certainly no longer. I'm a bit phobic about pencil at the moment but I also think drawing pen is good because there's no going back! It could be good to get some marker pens for drawing in permanent ink on large paper.

I am painting

this week. This is a photograph of a quick painting I did after the Cornish Pumphouse in Waihi was moved and there was a local celebration with fireworks. It's acrylic on canvas, 20 x 30 cm.

I've been working on this idea of the photo imagery in paintings, and on Monday I spent a long time on another one where I use the actual image on paper, glued to the canvas, beneath the work. This time I was working too quickly, I think, and had some problems so I've picked off some of the areas and have to work out what to do now.

I've also been working on a larger, 60 x 90 cm, canvas and this time quickly painted in the shapes and lines I want, then have layered over (and boy, do I mean layer after layer) glazes. I now have an underpainting (which was already underpainted) for a fourth mine painting, similar composition as the other three but more abstract. I'll look at it tomorrow, decide which dark lines need to come out and how I'm going to apply paint over the top. It looks a ghastly intense orange but it has a lot of colours in it, really! It also has the dreaded metallic paint in it - copper. Some of the glazes were rubbed on with cloth. Others painted with brush. I put the picture up to create pressure on myself to do something with it now.

Using my own resources

I was again looking through the photos I took in Auckland and have tinkered with a couple and thought they could be useful for drawing practice, looking at perspective and so on. These two I've uploaded on one document. I used the Photosuite programme to change them into images I will draw from.

The other image is some watercolour paper that I used to scrape off brushes used for another work. I have four pieces and kept them thinking I might "do" something with them eventually. Again, I've just superimposed one image on top of the other. I was reminded that I had these lying around after Cath http://cathrs.blogspot.com/ mentioned Martha Marshall on http://artistsjournal.blogspot.com noticed the potential of some newspaper she'd wiped paint onto.