Over the past few months I have been attending the Blackburn Artists society on Thursday Evenings. Each week we are given a “theme” to work with from chickens to sky scrapers and we’ve recently been out on location drawing the amateur dramatics society during a live dress rehearsal!
I’ve really loved attending Blackburn artists society so far and love having a prompt every week to challenge myself with ! I have ended up attempting to draw things I never would have tried and I have really appreciated working alongside many other talented and friendly artists, its amazing how varied the work is on a Thursday night given we are all working from the same prompt! My Mother in Law Joanna attends Blackburn Artists with me and it’s great to have a friend to go with and share he experience with!
Here are some example of the work i have been doing at Blackburn Artists society over the past few months.
This is the first picture I did at Blackburn artists society, the theme was “Juxtapositions”, I was inspired by man made vrs nature so drew this octopus crawling out of a tea cup in water colour and inks.
In this painting I attempted the theme “chickens” and made an abstract painting using collage over-layed with acrylic paints using a palette knife. I obviously added a bit of glitter too as I cant help myself.
This painting was under the theme “Medieval” so I decided to do a painting much like you would find on the borders of a medieval manuscript. This painting is in watercolour paints with a touch of gold acrylic. I ended up scanning this image and using it on a few Christmas cards I made for Christmas 2019.
This image was quite difficult to photograph as it spanned two pages of my A3 sketch pad so was quite large. The theme was “Panoramic” and this is a drawing of a panoramic photograph we took whilst on holiday in Yorkshire last year. This was done in an Urban sketchers style with water colour pencils and ink.
This picture I also completed in water colour pencil and ink, the theme was “Skyscrapers” and as I was planning to go to London for my birthday I thought i’d do London sky scrapers sky line.
For the theme “feeding time at the zoo” I attempted these 2 oil pastel drawings, the first time I’d used oil pastels since high school! I actually really loved this messy medium, and enjoyed working on different colour paper.
This mixed media work was based on the theme of “songs or poems” I used a rupi Kaur poem as inspiration for this picture:
For the theme “puppets and dolls” I actually made this doll “Sven the viking” out of paper kitchen rolls and glue! I had lots of fun making him at home, then attempted a coloured pencil still life of a group of dolls which I didn’t end up finishing.
This is a sketch I attempted on location with the Blackburn artists at the amatuer dramatics society’s dress rehearsal of the pirates of Penzance! This was a real challenge because it was dark and the actors obviously kept moving! I ended up drawing the orchestra and some of the audience as they were the most still!
This is my most recent Artists society painting, it’s based on a photograph of the Ring of Brodgar in Orkney, Scotland for the theme “standing stones” I used gouache for this picture which I have never used before but really like the bold matt colours.
Thanks for taking an interest in some of my more recent work, hope you like what you see!
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