Sat
cooked chicken
cooked dog food
potted roses
mixed up potting soil
did dishes
 did washing
went round Keryns, had tea with John and Liz. She made little pies in her pie maker, yum.

This is another face sketch, again not really looking like the original painting. I seem to have made her look too modern, but at least it's identifiable as a face. Cornelius Johnson. Portrait of a Lady, 1623

I've been sketching faces that interest me again.
Quite often I'll scribble one just before I go to sleep, it's a nice way to end the day, especially if I haven't managed to do anything else.The first one is from a Singer Sargent painting, Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose. I was holding the book at an angle and got the sketch wrong, but never mind. And there's too much shading, but I do get caried away.

This is from an old art calalogue and I'd never heard of the artist Abbey Altson, nor does this look much like the original painting. Sigh. I'm not much good at likenesses, I'm just glad they look human.

I'm working on the head of an arabian horse, and loving the gloss and shine on his face.
This shows my messy work table with all my clutter and bits and pieces- I find it very homely and comfortable when I sit down to paint. This is an old table that my Dad built and was in our family kitchen all through my childhood, so that makes me feel good too.

The colour is more accurate in the top photo, for some reason the scans are always a lot redder than in real life.

I love that proud arch to the neck that Arabs have, very nice to draw.
I have yet to finish the halter and the background, I get more excited about the horse and the rest isn't so important. I usually wait until I need to do two or three backgrounds and then do them all at once, I only have to mix up one lot of paint that way. Lazy, I know.

I love painting Arab horses, they're such beautiful animals.
I have to fight to make sure I don't make them too sleek and lean, not sure whether I succeeded here or not.

I do get a bit carried away with the muscles and highlights, but they're such fun to do!

This is a very small oil painting of a quarter horse.
This is the actual size, I went through a stage of doing minatures, and now I'm doing the opposite and trying to make myself paint bigger canvases.

You learn something from each approach, but I do have a fond spot for these little paintings, done with 000 sable brushes. They don't use much paint or canvas (board in this case) and can be finished in a couple of hours.
I don't think my eyes would be good enough to paint this small now, perhaps that's why I want to make things larger.

This is a sketch of my third son.

He was three years old when I did it (he's 19 now!), and I must admit I have quite a few drawings of him asleep, and almost none of him awake! Too hard to capture all that energy, so I'd wait until he was nice and quiet- much easier.
I hardly drew my first two sons at all, I guess I was too busy. I regret that I haven't got a nice 'sketch from life' of all my boys but I can't change that now.. Perhaps I'll be more diligent if I ever have grandchildren.

I was flicking through a book the other day and discovered this sketch hidden among the pages.
I haven't traced the painting I copied it from, but I'll look through a few more books and find it soon. I should have written it on the actual drawing I suppose.

I've always wanted to make a collection of faces that interested me, much like Laurelines 101 faces project. I was only going to do 50, and started drawing but I got bogged down because I decided later that I wanted them all the same size, on the same paper. This is only on cheap photocopy paper and someone who shall be nameless (third son) had torn the bottom off to write a phone number on. GRRR! ("Don't worry" he assured me, "You can draw another one")

I'm loving having a scanner and being able to play with cropping and resizing these works, some are on little scraps of paper, or cheap paper like this and there's even a couple on the backs of envelopes. But scanned and cropped they somehow look more important, more substantial, more significant somehow.
Don't you love eyes? I plan to play around and have a series of eyes from my paintings and sketches, and today I mucked around making greyscale images of the works I'd already stored. I do love having this technology!