Eye/flower

 So here's a painting I did, experimenting with an old bottle of ink that I found ( Windsor and Newton Drawing Indian Ink ). The technique is called spit-shading by a lot of people, but there's no actual spit involved.

On the right is the line inking (the page on the left of the image), and the initial sketch done on tracing paper (on the right)

Robot Step-by-Step II

Hey again, everyone, welcome to part two! I decided that it would be crazy to put all the pictures I have of the process in one post, so splitting it up seemed like the smart move. If you came here before Step I, here's a link to that. It's probably best to do things in chronological order.

Step Four: Working into the layers:

Shading the Ground:

 Here I've added more Burnt Sienna to the landscape, especially in the foreground. It's undiluted, so the colour is stronger, and in the hills behind, I've worked in a mix of Burnt Sienna and Yellow Ochre wet-into-wet, and then added a little Titanium White to that mix and worked that wet-into-wet as well.





More after the jump

Robot Step-By-Step

Hey again, fellow travellers. This post is a step-by-step of the process I used to do my Robot with Lady painting.

 I'm posting this because I would like it - I like step-by-step articles on just about anything, because I always like to see processes as they happen, and I figure, write what you love. So here goes:


Step One: Transferring the sketch.
(Doing the sketch I'm treating like a whole other process)

 So this is the start of me transferring the original drawing to the painting surface. I drew the image directly onto tracing paper, turned it over and traced the lines with a soft pencil (e.g.4B). What you see is the result of putting the soft-pencil side of the tracing paper onto the painting surface, and running over the lines with a hard pencil (e.g. 2H) or a ballpoint pen (I used the pen).
     The surface I'm using here is a sheet of hardboard cut to about A4, and coated with a couple of layers of gesso, applied with a housebrush. I like the housebrush, because it gives a grain to the surface that you can really get some paint in (I'll later experiment with applying the gesso with just a flat edge, so that it goes on smooth).

More after the jump.

Painting, permission and plagiarism

I love the tattoo style. One day, I will tattoo. Until then, I practise, and try to develop a style of my own.

Recently, I have remembered being blown the hell away by a gentleman called Derek Noble. I looked him up, and looked at his paintings. I love his work. I think I should reserve a large patch of skin for him.   Right lower leg, I think. Both sides. More likely, I will be able to get him at a convention some year, and he'll do a few hours worth on me. That's all off in the future though. Right now, I want to talk about influences.

It's easy for me to be influenced by another artist. It happens a lot. I imagine it happens like this to a lot of people. You see some new variation on images, some slight change to a set of understood symbols, and you add it to your own artistic vocabulary. I imagine influences apply like this to any creative endeavor (sewing, cooking, woodcarving, writing, film-making etc etc). It can be hard, especially if the new insight you have is really different for you, really profound, really hard hitting, not to fall into near- or outright plagiarism. People want to emulate their heroes. It's really common.

I'm trying hard not to plagiarize. I don't think I am - but seeing Derek's work gave me the confidence - and a sort of grammar of artistic expression - to use something that I have loved for a while. Big fat lines. Big fat fuck-off black lines. Happy man with a chubby marker pen. (of course, it's important to use varied width lines for a nice effect - more of that in the next post.) I swear, it was a revelation. Plagiarism, however, would be to copy something outright, without giving it credit as a copy. It's not creatively healthy to do either, but in science, we stand on the shoulders of giants: I see no reason that I cannot do the same
     To get the idea, imagine you want to write a novel. You have a hard time, though, thinking of how to express yourself just right, in a way you like. Maybe it's a fight scene in your book. So what do you do? You can just hammer at it and hope to stumble across a format that you like, or you can look at novels that have already been written, and see what you like. Emulate it. Take someone else's idea and bash it out of shape and into something that fits you better. Like George R.R. Martin, or Dan Abnett. Those guys write fight scenes almost blow by blow, then pull back for a big picture, then go back in close for a gory finish.

That's what it was like for me to see Derek's work. It was like getting permission to do something I had always wanted to do, and shown how it could be done. Shown the gory finish.

Without much more ado, then, I present Snake Lady, in ten parts:

Amanda Palmer plays the Ukelele without Pretention

You guys, you should know that I've become totally distracted from doing the big-ass post about Rubens. 

Basically it was going to be all about the violence inherent in his paintings, how that ties in to his overtly religious themes (because religions are typically violent dichotomies of reality vs non-reality that do not live side by side), I set it aside after typing for, like, hours, meaning to come back to it, but lost the thread of what I was going for. And realised it was pretentious-sounding gobshite anyway. Since I love Rubens' work, I'll probably come back to it another day, but I don't want to intentionally put out something that even I know is pretentious-sounding.

And as you may have guessed, this post is vaguely related to that theme

Amanda Palmer, a nice young lady who co-founded the well-liked Brechtian Punk Cabaret (That's what they call the genre;I had to look up the meanings of those words seperately to see how they fit together) duo The Dresden Dolls, also does stuff on her own. One of those things is play the Ukelele and muck about singing songs that only-sorta rhyme. I like that 

This was my favourite: Ukelele Anthem. You may like it too. As for me, I think I need to buy a ukelele and sing about things that piss me off in a happy way. 

New Work

Ok, I'm a day behind, I got distracted. By pizza-related shenanigans. And forgot to take the picture. But it's here now. I get there in the end. This one is not a step by step post, I didn't take pictures of the process as I went along. Is that something I should do? If you have an opinion either way, please let me know in the comments. This is a bit of a beach at sunset, at a village called Collieston, which is near to the city in which I now live, Aberdeen. It's a rocky motherlover (geogeeks, UNITE!) and all the rocks are slanted at the familiar angle. I'm not sure what rock the beach is based on - given it's location in Scotland it's a fair bet to say either granite or gneiss. Next time I'm there, I'll take way better pictures of the rocks so I can furnish you, dear readers, with my best guess. More discussion after the jump

Aberdeen, the Silver City

I know it's been a while since my last posting, and I've been unable to maintain my commitment to discussing and presenting artwork on this blog; I'm sure that everyone can appreciate the hectic upheaval of suddenly moving cross-country. Now the dust has settled, and I'm getting back into a routine. At any rate, my move to Aberdeen, which might as well be referred to as the Windy City, has been exciting and informative. I've met some cool people - Nicole Porter of the Nicole Porter gallery, the friendly dudes at Rapport Tattoo and Tattooed Freak Body Piercing, which I think is related.

I've also met the Aberdeen Artists Society (at least one of them), which I'm looking to become a member of when I've got some stuff to bring along. I'm hoping that there I'll have some folk to talk to about art, and perhaps receive some instruction/motivation/inspiration. Speaking of which, I've also met Kenny, of my nearest art supplies shop, The Artist's Pad.  And another thing - the Aberseen Art Gallery. It's brilliant. It's far beyond my expectations. The McBey room, where the work of Scottish artist James McBey is displayed, is magical. It also houses Rembrandt etchings, but I was't looking at them. And it has a free-to-the-public art library! Needless to say, I've had a busy wee while.

Now that my oils have come up from Glasgow, I'm looking forward to getting stuck right in. With some brand new canvas and a few photos of the Aberdeenshire village Collieston to hand, I'm about to have a batter at it.
Photos of that hilarious effort to be published on this blog, tommorow.

Some actual talking about art

I have always intended to use this blog as a platform for artworks, and as a way or recording my progress as I strive to increase my art prowess. Thus I set myself a task - that I will write about art at least once a week and do a bit on a piece of my own also at least once a week.

This week, I'm going to do Landseer, because I picked an artist at random.

Just a brief look at his Wikipedia page will give you the bare bones of his biography and a couple of his more famous paintings. A little more Google-fu and you can see his less famous ones. I like these better. Olga's Gallery has a selection of more of them, my favourites of these being The Old Shepherd's Chief Mourner, which just about brought tears to my eyes, such is the pathos of the subject, and Jocko With A Hedgehog, which cheered me up again. The man was a really good observer of animals, and they way they move and sit. Discussion below the link.

Oils, Inspirations and Visions

So I've recently been painting in oils. Water Miscible Oils, to be precise. They're made with safflower oil that has been chemically altered at the molecular level to be water-soluble. Paint and chemistry - together at last!

So it was important for  me to try and do some research on the subject, since I have no formal art training and I understand that oils are a highly technical medium. I want to do well right away. I read some online tutorials about the subject as preparation,  knowing, of course, that they wouldn't be quite enough. But at least I have a theoretical understanding of the very basics. I did some Googling around for these tutorials, scanned a few and discarded them, but there were two that stood out as being sufficiently nuts-and-bolts to help me - Jess Bates's website and Bill Martin's. There are, presumably, others that are technical in intention, but I'll have to get arounfdto them later.

It's also not enough to simply know how to do a thing - one also must know what to do with it. Sure I could be trying to do dry tonal exercises on spheres and cones, but to be honest that sucks boaby. I don't have the time or the canvases to spare on that, and little interest. I am aware that I'll probably have to do it to progress in the future, but right now I am focusing on having fun with the medium, mostly just figuring out for myself how the paint feels and works. The only problem is that to do anything other than dry technical exercises, it seems that one needs inspiration. And many days, I find that lacking.

Everyone has their own method of getting some inspiration together. When I feel like I need to do something, but don't have a clear idea of what I need to do, I generally round up my artbooks and leaf through them. I also do this with websites of artists whose books I don't own. So to present a very few of the colossal number artists whose work gives me ideas: dark-themed hyper-realist Michael Hussar, providing, if anything, a gruesome and insightful commentary through his symbolism (check out the piece entitles Vasoline), Scottish Colourist J D Fergusson who evidently delighted in the 'voluptuous delights of life', the expressive work of Chris Dingwell and the fantasy hyper-realism of Christophe Vacher, Paul Bonner and John Howe (I know, there's clearly something about me that loves highly detailed fantasy art). I might also suggest that one checks out the sculptorial/assemblage work of  Christopher Conte, which I discovered through the tattoo blog Needles and Sins. I love me some mechanisms and biomechanical stuff. Oddly not so much in tattoos, though.

Anyway, these are a few of the things that I am drawn to when languishing in the doldrums, or lost in need of direction. Like a dog that instinctively grubs for the roots and herbs that it somehow knows will cure it of its maladies, I return again and again to these people's work, most of all the sketches and preliminaries. There's more, of course, but that'll have to wait for another day.

So there you have it - a little technique, a little inspiration and a buttload of determination, and I'll go from here.

Some of my projects

I've been guilty of neglecting the art intention of this blog a little, but here I present a few of the things I've been working on. 

 The warm  (averaging 9 degrees or so this week) wet weather here in Scotland this winter has caused fungi to sprout everywhere, which continues to delight and fascinate me. I didn't get the chance to do the macro shots I wanted, but next time, dammit, next time.

 This is my very first attempt with oils - a crude, unplanned sketch on a cheap canvas. I find I like the texture of oil paint and I can see me spending a lot of time with oils in the future. A more serious discussion on oil painting  and the way that I am trying to work is set for an upcoming post.

 The outline for a whimsy in watercolour. I think it's going to be an interesting experiment in simple forms and bright colours, but I can't help the feeling that I've got to go weirder.

A sketch in black coloured pencil that I tossed off on the bus home. For style,  I've been working on more solid lines and clearer, simplified subjects. I don't have the kind of control I want with coloured pencil, as it feels a little strange, but I think I'm slowly learning to use it with a bit more dexterity.

For a wee while I'm going to be focussing on the oils to get a grip on them. I know it's generally regarded as a massively complex technique, that requires at least months of academic education and intense technical study to even approach, but I don't have that. What I do have is paint, brushes, some canvas, some time and a fistful of determination, and dammit, I can work with this!

Anyway, that's probably enough excuses for now...

New Medium!

I've recieved a set of water-soluble oil paints as a gift, and accordingly

there's gonna be some changes around here


In practise that means that I'm going to be experimenting with the new textures for a while, and there may be some new, weird stuff in the gallery of www.hbartgallery.com.

As ever, work continues to mean that if I have anything other than painting to do of an evening, then unfortunately painting must go.  While I'm looking forward to having money, I've actually yet to be paid either, so it appears that I have fallen into the gap of the old axiom '' you can have time or money but not both'', as I have neither. 

Some Links for your amusement.

One for the brain: We Are SkeptiXX, a newly started sceptical blog, inspired by the great tradition of proving that scepticals and rationalists aren't only bearded middle-aged men. Considering the peers of this valuable addition to the Blogoblogz, I personally am expecting great things.


One for the eyes: An artist in mechanical items and found objects makes things that are...so very fascination.

More Darwin:In which, unsatisfied with my first study of Charles Darwin, I try again.

Hullo reader!

My painting time has been consumed by the triplet goblins of Regular Work, Other Things To Do and Minecraft. I am ashamed.

However, I now publish my second study of Charles Darwin - unfortunately I'm having trouble getting the picture manager to work, so I'll have to describe these things a bit.

The Underdrawing - soft pencil on watercolour paper

 Rookie mistake here - I got carried away with drawing him and didn't measure it out properly - now he has an unnecessarily large beard. I always make this mistake out of sheer enthusiasm.

More after the jump!

Darwin, Rationality and Renaissance

I've been away from keyboard for a few days. I actually felt guilty about neglecting this blog.  In the time I've been able to snatch inbetween doing gainful employment, I've managed to produce a portrait of Charles Darwin.

One of the sites I love to  visit and revisit is Freethought Blogs, and my favourites there, Pharyngula, En Tequila Es Verdad and Blue Collar Atheist (this is not to suggest that these are the only blogs there, or the objectively best, or that the others are somehow unworthy. These are just my favourite three of a large group that I like immensely. I strongly suggest that anyone go to see if there's anything that catches their eye there). I wanted to show them how much I appreciate their words, which entertain and inform me so well and the idea came to me all of a sudden. A long term project was born (and I'm really going to stick to it this time) . It might take me a while, but I'm going to do them each a painting.

I thought I'd start with Charles Darwin. Central to a lot of debate, he's a famous figure in science politics, as the Theory of Evolution that he proposed was received poorly in his own time (and it still seems to have some resistance even today) and is pretty fundamental to basically every biological discipline.

So, taking up some peculiarly dense watercolour paper I had found, I got stuck right in doing some pencils for a study for it. The image is taken from an old photo, rather a famous one I think, and I basically mentally cropped it. I must say that the intense tonal contrasts in his face are extraordinary - Darwin was a craggy-looking fellow. I found it really interesting to work on all his myriad crevices and wrinkles. What a life of thinking and pondering and worrying he had - no wonder! 

I agonized long and hard about whether or not to do it in monochrome, like the old photo was, or whether it should be a colour study. As you can see, this is after the first couple of layers of watercolour, and it is indeed in colour. I thought that since the reference material was in monochrome, it would be an interesting challenge to try to render it in colour. It sure was.

 More pictures of my progress on this one after the fold.

Lanarkshire Sky

This is the final version of the painting. I'm calling it Lanarkshire Sky, for incredibly obvious reasons.

I've really learned some things from this painting:
1) That one must have a plan for the stages of the painting, so that you don't get awkward-looking segments that you then need to spend ages fixing.

2) That a warm, tonal underpainting would really have helped to give life and variation and depth to the final version.

3) Not to get hung about technicality and have some damn fun.

If you're interested in purchasing this piece, or any other, please see the Gallery page of my website, and feel free to contact me at my email address, hbartgallery@yahoo.co.uk

First Project Part II

So this here is what my first landscape in acrylics looks like after the first round of painting. I was meaning to just put down thin layers of mid-toned colours to act as a basis on which to paint lighter or darker paint, but I got rather... carried away. 

What I got rather carried away with was doing the sky, and painted waaaay more detail of the tones than I meant to before remembering that I had meant to take pictures of at least every other step. So the land is very simple, and the sky is mostly done. I worked wet-into-wet for the most part, especially on the sky , but the long dry grass (the yellow on the left hand side) was a case of putting down a thin layer of Yellow Ochre, followed up by a drybrush with a hog-bristle brush of Burnt Umber. I found that I loved the combination of layers of golden yellow and the scumbled purple (Alizarin crimson + Ultramarine + Umber) clouds. I was really making a conscious effort to do the hills in increasingly washed light, pastel colours as they move towards the horizon, to make use of aerial perspective.

More details next installment.

First Post in Blogger

Hello readers!

I'm Harry, a twenty-something from Scotland. Mostly, and nowadays, I'm an artist. I've been drawing a lot through my life, and studied art a little, but the traditional art institutions really haven't been for me, so I'm self taught. Accordingly, my techniques are half-formed and idiosyncratic, and my overall knowledge is patchy. I wanted to learn more, and learn better, but I knew that it would be easier, and more fun, to stick to if I wrote about it. Blogging my experiments and progress seemed like the natural thing to do. 

So that's the mission plan: learn about art and painting, post what I find out. 

I'm also going to weigh in on things I think about and things I see around the world, because, hey, I don't wanna be restrictive in my mission statement.