Life drawing sold

Well blow me down I went into the Sussex County Arts Club last night for the Tuesday Life Drawing Session and was amazed to discover that I had sold "Frankie", the one I put in almost as an afterthought, on the first weekend of the May Exhibition. Pastel pencil on Mi-Teintes paper.

Street Corner Symphony copy

I was recently commissioned to paint a larger size copy of a painting sold some years ago called "Street Corner Symphony". I drew it up by hand so that the composition is subtly different to the original but is in every other way as near to the original as I could get it, the buyer being particularly taken with the lighting which I made every effort to get right. Oil on MDF 36" x 36".

Third drawing for the SCAC May Exhibition

I have decided to frame up a third life drawing for the upcoming Sussex County Arts Club exhibition that will run during the four weekends of May as part of the Brighton Festival. It is in fact one from last night's session at the club of Francesca Cluny (Frankie), this pose being up for a vote to last fifteen minutes instead of the usual ten which I didn't vote for as I felt she was too far away to merit spending fifteen minutes on. Wrong. I would have loved to had an extra five minutes on this in retrospect......pastel pencil on Mi-Teintes paper.

"Saturated Colours" - my new article in Artists & Illustrators magazine

My latest article in Artists & Illustrators magazine has just been published in the June 2015 issue. This one concerns the use of saturated colour for one of my Roadside America series called "Saharan Sunset", a famous motel on Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles. In fact the colours are so saturated that the printing process of the magazine couldn't really handle it as there is a degree of subtlety in the original painting that is lost in the reproduction, although this is often the case when it comes to printing images of paintings in books and magazines.

Life Drawings

Russell

I have been going through all the life drawings I have done over the past year at the Sussex County Arts Club to choose some to frame up for the May Exhibition of the club during the Brighton Festival. I will choose two or possibly three from these, all pastel pencil on Murano or Mi-Teintes paper:

Kate

Laura Kate

Michaela

Ischia

The reason why there have been no posts for a while is that I have been in Italy for a short holiday based in Naples. I only managed to get one session in of painting/sketching and that was on the island of Ischia. I  found a nice quiet spot facing the Castello Aragonese and settled down for a couple of hours of painting. Gouache over a thin acrylic wash put down in the UK in a large Moleskine sketchbook.

Main Street slightly repainted

There was something that always bugged me after I thought that I had finished "Main Street". One was the whole painting looked a bit pallid and a bit too "real" so I gave it a thin glaze of transparent yellow but this still wasn't enough so I gave it another glaze today which has brought it to a state that I am now happy with. I also accentuated the Cold War era feeling that I am interested in by having a vapour trail high in the sky.