ARTWORK: Ghost

Painted 04/05/15. Acrylic on canvas board, 14"x10".

This was a super quick speed painting I did after watching S4E4 of Game of Thrones. I wanted to see how quickly I could create something that looked decent, and managed this in about 30-45 minutes.

ARTWORK: Mourne Mountain Walk #2

Painted 04/05/15. Acrylic on canvas board, 16"x12".

Another painting from the same set of photos as the last Mourne Mountain Walk painting!

ARTWORK: She Wears the Stars In Her Hair

Painted 07/05/15. Acrylic on canvas board, 22"x18".

THIS PAINTING TOOK ME THREE DAYS.

I swear there are like a million layers where I've been trying to get the skintone just right. Saturn stands about an inch off the canvas where I've been layering and layering enough paint so that the blue of the space behind it wouldn't bleed through.

The subject has gone through several facelifts, from duckfacing party girl to female Mr Burns (yes, she did look like that at one point) to finally looking like how I'd envisioned her in my mind.

ARTWORK: Mourne Mountain Walk #1

Painted 03/05/15. Acrylic on canvas board, 16"x12".

The day I painted this, I was feeling a bit down in the dumps about my ability as an artist. While I ate breakfast, I decided to watch some of Bob Ross's video tutorials - I reckoned it was the perfect thing to lift my mood while picking up some important tips and tricks to improve my technique.
Later in the day, I did this. It was a challenging piece of work - especially capturing the shadows that the trees on the right cast across the grass and the pathway. I painted this from one of my holiday snaps, and another thing I found a challenge was trying to recreate the depth of the work. To achieve this, I built the painting up from background to foreground: sky, trees in background, grass furthest to nearest, then the nearer trees depending on their distance, and then the path itself.

ARTWORK: Accidental Will Graham

Painted 01/05/15. Acrylic on canvas board, 18"x14".

Named as such because he ended up looking kinda like Will Graham from Hannibal - plus there's the stag connection. I have never watched the series so I guess this happened subconsciously :P

ARTWORK: Self Portrait #2 - With Rats

Painted 28/04/15. Acrylic on canvas board, 20"x16".

My second attempt at a self portrait, because there were a few things I wasn't happy with with the first. I decided to paint myself with one of the things I love most in life - rats!
On my head is Teyla. On my shoulders, L-R, is Violet, Florence and Stormy, AKA Stormageddon.
I'm much happier with this one, but I'll continue to paint self portraits to improve :)

ARTWORK: Self Portrait #1

Painted 21/04/15.

This is the first self portrait I've ever done, and it was so weird because it meant not only did I have to stare at my own face for a good few hours, but I had to work really hard to create an accurate representation of myself.
It appears quite pinkish because I painted it from a photo I took in my room - I have purple curtains and they were closed at the time. Plus, my skin is quite reddish in hue anyway!

ARTWORK: Sunset Over St Helens

Painted 14/04/15.

This one looks a lot more rough - the whole thing was wet-on-wet as I was painting late at night and didn't want to wake everybody up with the hairdryer!
Featuring the industrial skyline of St Helens circa 2012, as viewed from the Grange Valley area of Haydock.

ARTWORK: Late Sunset

Painted 14/04/15. This is a painting of a very late sunset from a photo I took just down the road.

I used a clean, dry 2" house brush on the background to achieve a gradient, working in dark blue, sky blue, tiny amounts of green, then yellow and orange until it looked smooth.
Clouds were a varying mixture of light pink, orange and brown, using a wet-on-wet technique to blend them in.
My original photo doesn't have the sun in it, but I thought the painting would look better overall if it was featured.

ARTWORK: Slieve Donard From Murlough Beach

Painted on 12/04/15. This is a redo of an old painting I did back in 2010, but never finished.

Took me ages to figure out how I could get decent looking pebbles on the beach when it occurred to me: gab a fistful of cotton buds, dab them in grey paint that had been mixed so it looked marbled, and slam 'em on the canvas!

ARTWORK: Night Sky #1

Painted on 14/03/15, the first acrylic painting I've finished in about four years.

I used sponges to create the effect of nebulas/space dust, and a piece of penne pasta for the finer stars because it was the narrowest point I could find!

I AM REAL! (& some exciting news!)

I'm still alive! Feels like I preface a lot of my journal entries with that statement... but still! I'm back with a long post for you all!

Finally, I have a computer back. My dad was kind enough to set up a desktop PC for me in my bedroom. PC means Scrivener, Scrivener means being able to organise the novel much more efficiently! Yay!

As a result I'm taking a break from writing anything new, while I transfer my manuscript scene by scene into Scrivener. It's so incredibly useful - you can have index cards featuring the synopsis of every scene, so you can see an overview of the entire plot and just drag and drop stuff to rearrange them. So much easier than cutting and pasting scenes in OpenOffice and praying to your chosen higher power that you don't muck it up and lose a couple thousand words somehow.

Having my computer back also means I can change the layout and style of this blog a lot more easily. It's been crying out for some tweaking for some time; I want to change it to accommodate the blog's new dual purpose - to keep all 0 of my fans updated on my writing and my artwork too.

That's what I'm here to talk about mainly, my artwork. I hadn't really wanted to talk about it much in case I jinxed stuff but 1) I'm too excited to keep my gob shut and 2) I've realised lately that when I wanna talk about stuff, I should just fucking talk about it instead of skipping around it in case of imaginary curses and whatever!

I've been focusing a lot on my art lately. Took up painting again after about... *counts on my fingers* four or five years? I'm pretty skilled with pencils and pens, but had always been terrified of working again with paint because it wasn't my main thing (I was always "the biro kid" in my art lessons at school) and because it's kinda different as mediums go.

But there were certain things that could be quickly done in acrylics that would take me a bazillion years to do in pen. Case in point, pictures of the night sky. I'd tried a few times to do something in pen that looked good, but inevitably looked like a load of black ink scribbled on so heavily that it tore the paper, with some tiny white circles dotted about.

So, in March, I dug out my old paints and some old canvas board that had been sitting looking forlorn in my room. Lit some incense up, made a cup of tea, stuck some music on... and I painted.

Since then, I haven't really been able to stop. Sometimes the day job gets in the way, or I'm not at home. I'm terrified of painting while at my fiance's in case I get a tiny spot of paint on his mum's table. I'm sure she wouldn't kill me but I've always had a thing about leaving the tiniest bit of mess in another person's house, even though my house is a trash heap. But yeah, apart from when those things have been stopping me, I've been painting a lot. I'll post the paintings I've done soon, but for ease of navigation around my blog I'll post them in separate entries, all tagged nicely.

I suppose this sudden explosion of painting came about when I realised, during my night sky piece, that painting wasn't at all as terrifying as The Biro Kid in me had thought it to be. It was actually really fun and hey, I was actually creating a night sky I was happy with! And some of the skills I'd picked up working with pen and pencil all these years still applied! I've had three really important realisations lately:

1.  I create art, therefore I am an artist.
2. Allowing myself to get messy? It's fucking liberating, man.
3. Also liberating? Giving myself permission to suck. Because that is how I learn. 

All this painting will come in handy, though, because on the 23rd of May I'm taking the overnight ferry crossing back to Northern Ireland! Why is this important, I hear you ask? Well, this is actually the thing that I didn't wanna blog about at first in case of imaginary jinxes and stuff. 

The main reason for my visit, it goes without saying, is to visit my lovely Mum. I haven't seen her in a little while so the itch to return home was there anyway. Lately, though, she's been struggling with depression. When I heard that, I decided I really had to go, to see if I could help.

But there's another reason. My stepdad, Geoffrey, has the most random assortment of friends - and amongst these friends is an artist called William Mulhall. He rose to prominence after doing some work for Led Zep back in the 1970s, and since then he's painted portraits of all kinds of people - Bob Dylan, Seamus Heaney, John Lennon... He's involved with Game of Thrones, too, what with parts of being filmed over there - I think he's an extra, as are his sons, and I believe they were involved with the building of a longship for the show too? 

A year or so ago, Geoffrey had the idea to show William some of my work - and somehow he was impressed. Next thing you know, Geoffrey has this guy on the phone to me, this Actual Real Artist™, and he's talking to me for an hour or so about art and slowly unpicking my very soul through just a phone conversation, and I'm just sat there like holy shit is this for real how does he know that I'm a super reserved introvert with no self esteem and yeah. Terrifying, but enlightening.

It was after that call, where William told me to believe in myself, that I was an Actual Real Artist because I created art and, while unpolished, it was good art (a massive compliment coming from someone like him), that I realised something important. I was the main thing holding me back. Subconsciously, I'd figured that because my work sometimes looked a little wonky, and I was pretty much unknown, that it wasn't worth trying to put my work out there. I'd always been comparing myself to other artists and feeling down because my work wasn't something you'd ever see in a "HOLY SHIT THESE LOOK LIKE PHOTOS BUT THEY'RE ACTUALLY PAINTINGS" Buzzfeed article. 

So yes, Geoffrey is eager to bring me to meet this guy. Hopefully - fingers, toes and kidneys crossed - an actual, in-person meeting with this guy where I can show him some of my artwork and talk to him about it will be a big step forward. He's apparently interested in moving towards selling some of my stuff, and I'm sure that he'll be able to give me some pointers on my work and shaping my identity as an artist. I'm so excited! You bet I'm gonna be painting like a maniac between now and then!

... when I get more white paint, that is. Heheh.