Gregs Art Blog

This week we started one of our units which I'm really excited about. And that's of course observational drawing. I did this unit in the BTEC course quite a few years ago now and it was one of my stronger units. now that I'm doing it at HNC level I'm expecting more of a challenge  So we came in on Thursday morning and sat down ready to start. we didn't know what to expect. just that we would be drawing. we are then instructed to bring the extra chairs from the second room through which was odd as we had plenty for the students. We then moved all the tables back to make way for all the chairs we brought through. We then we witnessed the creation of a mountain of chairs for us to draw.   This was the first task we were set out to do which was on yesterday. We were to draw using only line work which was an interesting challenge. it made us think more about the definite shapes of the objects and we had to work out perspective. We were given ...

For our first assignment we were told to choose two painting from a Presentation, which we went through in class. The subject of these paintings was aimed at the female body. It was interesting to see the different approaches the artists took and the different techniques to achieve these great pieces of work. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, La Grande Odalisque , 1814, Oil on canvas, 36" x 63" (91 x 162 cm),   I've chosen to review this painting done by Jean Auguste-Dominique Ingres. I've chosen this painting because it stood out for me amongst the rest that were shown. The main reason is because of the way the subject is positioned so discreetly from the rest. I first thought that most of the work was focused on the background. I thought this while observing the silk curtain, its one of the most realistic parts of the painting. I got a very orental feel about this painting while looking at it. The anatomy of the lady is all over the place, her sp...

 The Imagination of Stan Lee Acrylic on Canvas bigger than A3 (Sorry about the crappy photo quality)  This is a painting I did a while ago as a tribute to Stan Lees comic book creations. I am a big fan a comic books espeicially Marvel so I thought I should include him in one of my 'painting the famous' portraits. I tried to make it look as though his charectors were bursting out of his imagination. My original Idea was to do silhouettes of the charectors but it looked rubbish so I decided to paint them.  After I painted the charectors I put paper over them and splattering the canvas with paint. I then paint Stan Lee over the top of it (which isnt quite finished). I have a few other paintings which I will be putting on here as soon as they are finshed

(Sorry I havent posted anything on here for a while) So for my final major project I have decided to paint portraits. The title of the unit will be "Painting the Famous". The idea is to end up with half a dozen portrait of famous people who I find interesting and inspiring. This is my first idea which is a portrait of the famous film director Tim Burton along with a handful of his amazing creations. The first challenge was the colour scheme which I wanted to keep dark and gothic like his movies so I decided to prime the canvas with black before I started the portrait. It started out as a simple portrait which was only meant to be a practice for when I do it on a larger scale but I decided to take it further by adding charectors from his films which I think worked out quite well.  Acrylic on canvas (size is roughly A3) It took me about 4 days to paint   Im really glad with how this turned out ...

We've had some really beautiful skies recently      Photo-Manipulation I was trying to make it look as though the image was dissolving but it didnt work out as well as I hoped This is the photo I used, it was very time consuming due to the fact that I dont know much about photoshop yet    

I decided to try out some photo editing for my location photography unit. Original I didnt do much with this one, I just added a filter called singe  Original  Here I cropped the image and adding a blue overlay to the water  Original  Here i played around with the colour temperature and added a border  Original  I masked out the butterfly and started to add a gloomy backgound  Here I cropped the photo and changed only the background to grayscale.

Here's a A1 pencil drawing I did about a week ago in college. It was very challenging because we had to draw for roughly 6 hours and we had to make it as realistic as possible, I enjoyed it though. (sorry about the picture quality, I took the picture using my ipod )    

I decided to try out liquid photography after being inspired by Martin Waugh's work, heres a link- http://www.liquidsculpture.com/fine_art/index.htm I plan on trying this again when get a tripod for my camera and figure out a better setup I used watered down acrylic paint to create the colours The first two didnt really turn out as clear as I wanted and I didnt like the angle  I think these two came out really well. I adjusted the shutter speed to capture the drips and increased the aperture setting to let more light into the camera   This was just a quick experiment using ink   

Today me and the class took a trip to Hainning House in Selkirk. We did some observational drawings and took some photos. Here are some of the photographs I took Here are some of my observational drawings