Open Studios

Hampshire Open Studios started on 22^nd August and finishes tomorrow.  It’s such a great opportunity to see local artists and their work.  My art group has an exhibition in a local church hall together with some craft stalls and there’s been some fantastic art on display. 

I displayed my giraffe eye pastel painting together with a kitten pastel painting that I did from a tutorial by Rob Ballentine, although to be honest, I didn’t watch the majority of the videos as they’re too time consuming.  Here you can see the first stages of the painting, getting down blocks of colour and then putting in the nose and eyes.  I wasn’t sure about the background and regretted putting it in but I think it worked out OK in the end.

The next stages were to put in the fur details.  The part of this I found challenging was that the face and the paw were in focus but the leg became less focused and the other front leg was out of focus.  It took close observation of the reference photo to get these aspects right.

Here’s my finished piece that I exhibited.  She turned out much better than I expected.

This wasn’t the only cat I’ve been drawing lately.  My art group has a local artist do a demonstration each month and a couple of months ago, we had the amazingly talented Helen Carter using watercolour pencils.  She had some goodies to purchase and I bought this fabulously detailed photo tutorial booklet from her.  I’ve got a huge set of barely used Faber-Castell Polychromos pencils so I thought it was about time they got used.  I had no idea whether this was going to be beyond me but I figured the only way to find out was to give it a try.  These are the stages I went through, starting by tracing the cat as my drawing skills are not great.  I decided to do the eyes and nose first as if they didn’t look good, there was not much point in doing the rest.

After completing the eyes, nose, ears and bell/tags to my satisfaction, I was nervous about doing the fur.  It seemed quite overwhelming but Helen’s booklet guided me through the process and colours.

Adding the darks is quite scary but it really starts to bring the cat to life.

This lovely pewter coloured frame was the perfect match for the grey background and I love my portrait of Missy.

My next challenge is to try to use the techniques I’ve learned from these two projects to paint our cats.  Wish me luck!