Another Day

On one of my beach walks I found this magnificent Shag, just lying there still warm, but obviously quite dead. There were no signs of distress or damage so I assume it just died of natural causes. I brought it home and made this painting of it. I had to keep spraying the flys and by the time I had finished it was starting to smell a fair bit! It ended up being a study in black.

I love guitars, and I also like making things, so in recent years I've combined these two passions in the obvious way - making guitars!  So far I've made three classical guitars and one solid body Les Paul type guitar.  This time I wanted to make a Stratocaster guitar - the strat is the one everybody thinks of when they think of an electric guitar. I had a couple of blocks of old recycled kauri timber and I thought it would be nice to have a guitar made of kauri.  I had to join three pieces to have a big enough piece for a body.  I used epoxy resin and clamped the sections together.  I then made a template from my plan, and marked out the shape of the body and used a bandsaw to roughly cut the shape out. I then used a router to finish the edges and marked out where all the various pockets for the hardware needed to go before routing them out. I then tryed to round the edges with the router but it felt uncomfortable and wasn't d...

I havn't updated this blog for quite some time! I'm not sure if anyone reads it but anyway... Here is a painting of bottles in it's early stages that I recently started. I concentrated on the transparent bottle with the red pencil in to start with, mainly because I was unsure about how to paint it. I find coloured glass much easier and more satisfying to paint. People always ask "how do you paint glass?", I was pondering this as I painted and decided  that painting glass is easy; it's painting the other side of the glass that's tricky.

I had another attempt at Anne's face last session.

Naked Man Holding a Cup. A quick silverpoint drawing I did at my last life drawing session. This was done with a biggish piece of stirliing silver onto a light yellow toned gouache paper. I've proven to myself that silverpoint doesn't have to be all painstaking fine lines and cross hatching. I really liked the natural pose. This was just as he was standing naturally during our coffee break. I prefer these poses to the more contrived poses that models are often encouraged to assume in life drawing classes.

A detail of Anne's face after another session.