Gloucester Summer School

July 22nd - 26th

The Gloucester Summer School is organised and run by  Gloucester Arts and Crafts Group and is a week long workshop event at Beaufort Community School, Tuffley. I have been tutoring a 5 day batik workshop with them at this event since 2008. I was booked for 2007 but that was the year of the awful floods and the event was sadly cancelled  due to the extreme flooding and loss of power and water facilities in the area.

The workshops are held over 2-5 days depending on the course and subjects range from working with textiles, painting, mosaics, glass work, batik, drawing, woodwork crafts, sculpting and more.


As usual the school is open the Saturday morning prior to the event for tutors to set up their classroom. And I was very pleased to see that this year I had been given a bigger room, the home economics classroom, which gave me plenty of space for my 12 students. Not only that it had many windows that opened, an outside door and a shaded aspect.

The set up went well and apart from one or two last minute things to do, it was ready for Monday morning.


This year I had more students but they were also spread over the week, some doing all 5 days  a few others only doing 2 or 3. So the maximum number I had in class would be Monday and Tuesday with 10 ladies... 5 of whom had done batik before with me several times and another 5 who were new or who hadn't been for a few years. The set up of the room allowed me to separate them into these two groups so that I could have all the Beginners in one place so that they could all see what I was doing as I took them through the initial stages. The Improvers could get on with their own thing but still be close should they need help/advice.

Due to the changing rota of students I was not able to work on something myself, as I usually try to do at the end of the week. Once I have the beginners and Improvers well on their way (usually by Thursday) with their own projects the frequency of me being needed slows, enabling me to have a play with a 'demo' piece. I like to do this as I think it is good for the students to see me working on something too, it can give them ideas or just see how I work. This year I was to have two new ladies starting on the Thursday. And at the beginning of the week Ann, the organiser, asked if I could take a third lady on Thursday for 2 days. As it turned out, one of the original two tried silk painting at the beginning of the week and quite sensibly decided to stay with it and the third lady also decided to stay on the course she was doing. So I had one new lady on Thursday, who had a crash course, to get her going on her own project and one of the new ladies who was with me all week was struggling a bit with the technique. Sometimes the technique is picked up straight away sometimes not and I think it's just a question of which way your brain is used to working. With batik you tend to work from light to dark putting in the highlights first and building the image from 'the front' to 'the back' in perspective.

It was a busy but fun week. Yet again I had a great group of cheerful ladies, and as always I can't help but be inspired and thrilled by their progress and the work they produce. I love it when someone is working on something and its not going how they thought and they just see where things are 'wrong' and get a little negative about its outcome.... and then they take all the wax off at the end, stand back and look at it and then say.. 'That's come out better than I thought, I like it now.' As in any form of art it's getting the knack of looking beyond the 'mistakes' you think you've made that stand out so glaringly to you and seeing the product of your endeavours as a whole entity and as others may view it. They often won't see that 'slightly pale line that you didn't want to be there', or the blob of wax that you had to change into a strange looking part of your design/image.

I put the work on display and quite often by the end of the week the ladies get to look back on their earlier work with fresh eyes and appreciate all the good things they achieved with it. When they see that they have done well... that makes me happy.

I have selected a piece from each of them, pieces that were my own personal favourites of what they achieved in the week. The diversity of styles and inspiration is always good to see and I am proud to show their work on here.

Jan laying in a finishing coat of wax over her design

Margaret waxing in her design with a tjanting (also known as canting)

Ann's iris's (Beginner)

Avril's cornflower design (Improver)

Chris's daisies (Beginner)

Margaret's sunflowers (Beginner)

Del's pot (Improver) 

 This piece is yet to be finished, however I have posted it because I really like where Del is going with this and I feel it could almost be finished as it is.

Gill's poppies (Improver)

Hazel's Bamboo (Improver) 

Designed for a cushion, with (below) the beautifully crackled back-piece

Jane's Pansy (Beginner)

Jan's abstract (Beginner)

Jenny's Apples (Improver)

Rita's parrotfish pattern design (Beginner)

New blog - In the Footsteps of Elephants

I have just set up a new blog and Facebook Page, both are called 'In the Footsteps of Elephants'.
They will both be about the journey I am taking working towards an exhibition of my work to raise funds and awareness for Elephants For Africa.  As both are so new, there is still work I want to do to them to get them 'fully presented', so if you are interested in elephants, their conservation  and art then please take a look and pop back to check on updates of news and images.

Click on these links for the Facebook Page and for the Blog

News

I have two bits of news to on report today. Both are exciting for me and I don't know which to put first... so I'll go with my new Facebook page first.

'In the Footsteps of Elephants' is a Page I have set up on Facebook to post news and progress of my exhibition project with Elephants For Africa. I have some photos of my time spent in the Okavango Delta in 2011 and some images of the work I shall be exhibiting when the exhibition takes place. I will be posting on the progress of the body of work I am in the process of painting and also news and updates on the exhibition details such as venue and date and other things connected with it. So please visit it and click 'Like' to keep informed of this event.
And for those who want to steer clear of social networking sites, I hope to have a companion blogpage set up soon doing the same as the Facebook Page.

My second bit of news is that Artists For Conservation have given me the honour of being their 'Conservation Artist of the Month' for August. I shall feature on the homepage of their site and on the Conservation Page for the whole of this month. I was most surprised to receive this award but I am obviously over the moon. My dream as an artist is to inspire a sense of caring and concern for our natural world, in the hope that my efforts can directly and indirectly aid those who work hard in the field of wildlife conservation. To be selected for this award brings a sense of satisfaction that maybe I am on the right track.

Getting set for Summer School

I have been busy getting ready for the Gloucester Arts and Crafts Summer School week at Beaufort School in Tuffley, Gloucester. They take over the school after the last week of term and hold many varied 2,3 and 5 day workshops doing anything from chair making, life drawing, clay sculpture, beading, mosaics, painting, needlework and of course, batik.
Today I went to set up the classroom ready for the students and workshop to begin on Monday. For a few years we have had a smallish classroom (a sewing room) that had few workable windows and one small door to the outside. It had sun almost all day long coming through the windows (when it shone) making it a very hot little room... and with the waxpots, hairdryers and iron going too it was quite a struggle for many of my students to cope with the heat. Luckily the last two years we were loaned a portable air-con unit, which made a huge difference.

This year, as I have almost twice the number of students attending over the week (some are only doing two or three days) I have been given a bigger classroom... a cookery room. It is huge in comparison and has a great position in that it has a shaded aspect, lots of windows that open and a door. So hopefully we should fair better this year.

I'm looking forward to a busy but sure to be fun week.

Kamal Study - Demonstration piece

This painting was done so that I could work on it at three demonstrations to show how I paint long and short fur with oils to three different art groups - Thornbury Art Group near Bristol and the Gloucester Society of Artists (GSA) and the Churchdown Art Group in Gloucestershire. It has however now only been painted on at two demonstrations, as some of the people who attended the second demonstration for the GSA were likely to also be at the third (which is next Wednesday) in Churchdown. So I shall be doing something else for them that night.

This step by step is posted, in particular, for those who attended the demonstrations where I worked on this painting, as I thought it might be useful for them to see it through its finishing stages.

For the demonstration I thought a male lion would be a great subject on which to show long and short fur techniques. The lion is Kamal, an Asiatic, that we had at Bristol Zoo Gardens. He died late in 2012 due to old age related illnesses... he was 18 years old... quite an age for a lion. He came to Bristol Zoo Gardens in 2008 and had two cubs with our lioness, Shiva, in 2010 and fathered two more cubs with Shiva prior to his death. His keepers told me he was a gentle lion and loved being tickled or scratched through the wires of his enclosure by them. He was a handsome chappie, with a thick dark mane. He is greatly missed.

This was a copy of a photograph... but embellished in colour as the photo was rather dull and flat.

Recently I have been attempting a looser approach and part of this is not to do a detailed pencil drawing first, but to sketch paint the portrait straight onto the canvas. For this portrait I used burnt sienna greatly thinned with Liquin and a rigger brush. The ample use of Liquin allows the paint to flow much more freely off the brush. I start by looking at my photo and visualising where I can see shapes and lines to help me draw the features. These are quickly sketched in and if I go wrong I just wipe the line away with soft tissue... this smudges the paint so that if I do a lot of wiping away.. the canvas gets a soft burnt sienna hue which adds to the base painting.

Once I have all the basic elements from which to build my portrait I then check the measurements and proportions. I used the eye as my basic measurement and compared the eye width on the photograph with that of my painting... measuring how many there are, say, from the top line of the eye to the top line of the nose, or the top line of the head, or the total width of the facial area... I check the positions of eyes, nose, ears etc by visualising imaginary lines across the face... e.g. going from the inner corner of the eye down and seeing how far the edge of the nose is from that line and comparing the photo with my painting... I do this until I am happy I have the proportions and positions about right. It is worth taking your time doing this, at this stage, because it is much easier to correct when you have not started applying lots of paint and going into any detail.

Once I am happy with the basics, I add some detailing to the features.

Only then do I start on the full painting. I tend to work from the back of the scene to the front... so I put the background and body in very roughly before I started on the dark part of the mane. I didn't put any detail in the background or body as I want the focus to be fully on the face... and lack of detail in backgrounds etc make the viewer's eyes concentrate elsewhere. I worked wet into wet layering lighter colours on top of dark. A larger brush was used to block in the dark colour and then using a rigger, I applied lighter tones on top to create the fur.

I painted in the ear and blocked colour in on the nose and for the lighter fur to the left side of the face.

I then used the rigger to layer in light tones for the long fur building up with tones of light browns and creamy colours adding in a few streaks of warming orangey brown tones and pale greyish purple tones for shadows in the fur. Next the eyes were added.... putting in the eyes in the early stages helps me 'create' the character I am painting... almost as if I am creating a relationship with my painted subject - making a connection that gives me some 'inner knowledge' that adds life to the work. Of course, it helps that I knew this lion and had seen him often in the 4 years he was with us at the zoo. It was at this stage that I stopped working on the lion at home, so that I could continue with him at the Thornbury demonstration.

At the Thornbury demo I painted in the fur over his left ear and on the left side of his forehead. I then left it until I went to the GSA demo where I then added in the light coloured long fur to the right of the face and started  on the short fur under the right eye and on the bridge of the nose. The dark grey tone on the nose represents the skin colour under the fur... Kamal had a few skirmish scars and this grey tone will show through the gaps I leave as I paint the very short fur. So this was 'the state of play' after both demos. My plan had been to then do the long fur over the right ear and the right side of the forehead for the third demo, but after being made aware there would be some  of the same folk attending the next demo I thought perhaps they'd like to see me working on something else... otherwise it would be a 'bit samey' for them.

So I continued with Kamal at home..... 

Once the fur at the top of the head was done I then moved my attention to the nose and muzzle.

Because this is a particular individual it is important to get the spotting on the muzzle of where the whiskers grow and just to the side of each nasal cavity right.. as these are often used as identification markers... being different in each individual. If you have watched Big Cat Diary you may have heard Jonathon Scott or Simon King refer to these marker as their way of being able to identify individuals, along with other identifying markings.  I did contemplate not painting in the wet fur under Kamal's nose... but that was something he always seemed to have, so as that was him... I had to paint it.

Finally the whiskers were added and the foreground put in. Again the foreground is lacking in detail so that the viewer's eyes are thrown to where I want them to go... the central area of the eyes. Kamal is looking straight at you...and that is the impact of this piece... Kamal lives on.

Silk Banners for the Bristol Festival of Nature

On Thursday 23rd and Friday 24th I went back to Junior School! Scary stuff! I had those dreadful flashbacks to those horrible school years each time I heard that school bell ring!
But apart from that....

I was there to help 60 school children convert their designs into batiked silk banners. 

The Avon Gorge and Downs WIldlife Project had spent some days previously with the children taking them up on The Downs  to find all manner of butterflies, bugs, spiders and other insects; teaching them about the wildlife that can be found in this wonderful area of Bristol and instilling/encouraging an appreciation and care for that wildlife. 

From their expeditions of insect hunting, the children had several activities to do to tie that experience together.. They were divided into 10 groups and each one concentrated on a specific family of insects such as.. Butterflies and moths, Beetles, Centipedes, Flies etc. They then had to draw an insect, within their group, that can be found on The Downs or in the Avon Gorge and that was then to be incorporated into a design to go on a banner. These banners would then be hung around the zoo tent at the Bristol Festival of Nature in the middle of June.

I was booked to do the workshop with the children, turning their designs into banners. We had 10 pieces of silk measuring 2 metres by 90cms and onto this we got the children to batik their designs using brushes and melted wax.

We were working in the classroom with 30 children each day, so it was a bit noisy as the majority of the class worked on their other activity (making top trump cards of their chosen insect), we had relays of children in groups of 5 or 6 come to the tables we had set up in one corner. 

I did a quick run through at the beginning of the day to all the children in the class on safety issues of being around hot melted wax and a few basics on using the brushes to draw their designs using the wax and adding colour. I had at least one helper, throughout and once we got our 'plan of attack' sorted.. it became a bit of a production line.

It was quite full on as there were 5 groups of children, and their banners, to fit in each day between 9.30am and 3.15pm (minus morning tea break and lunch) which left us with 4 hours 40 mins to set up each design template and silk, do a quick recap with each group on what to do and what not to do, find out what their design was about and what colours they wanted, get them to wax the design, colour the design, then remove the silk and design template, take the silk to an office to hang, clean the table, sort the colours, equipment ready for the next lot... five times! So about 40-45 mins for each group to actually wax and paint... not very long at all!!

Each full design had been drawn to size, onto the back of a sheet of wallpaper matching the measurements of the silk. This was taped down onto the table tops (which had been covered in several layers of dust sheet plastic) and over the top of this we taped the slightly longer lengths of silk. The designs had been drawn in pencil and could be seen through the silk so the children could follow their designs lines easily. They then painted with wax the outlines of their bugs and the different elements of their backgrounds like tree trunks, leaves, clouds , the sun etc (my helpers and me did a lot to help them on the background, just to speed up the process). Then we got them to colour it with silk paints... I had batches of basics like blues, yellows, green red and black.. and had to mix to order extras like oranges, greys, purples etc. Once the colour was on we encouraged the children away from the table  and waxpots (not always easy!) and removed the silk to an office where it could be hung to dry, then removed the design template wiped the table clean of excess colour before taping the next design down, placing a fresh piece of silk over the top and starting again.  

The kids were mostly brilliant and seemed to really enjoy the painting with wax and silk paints. It was too rushed to get them to take their time and do it really well, so there were a few leakages of colour and splodges of wax in the wrong place, but well... it all adds character, doesn't it. 

At the end of the school day I took the banners home to iron off the wax, which also 'fixes' the colour through the heat. These will then go back to Mandy of the Avon Gorge and Downs Wildlife Project to take to the Bristol Festival of Nature to hang on display. The Top Trump cards the children made will be used as part of an activity where other children can match the insect on the card to the one on the banner and learn more interesting facts about that species. 

They did some great designs and the finished work looks great, I hope, if you intend visiting the Bristol Festival of Nature, you get a chance to pop into the Bristol Zoo Tent where I think they are to be displayed.  

My thanks for such a great day go to Mandy for organising it and to Joss, Randy and Hetty for their unstinting help batiking. Joss stuck with me for all of both days, his help was invaluable.

Here's a photo of the children working on one of their banners... this one is beetles, doesn't it look great.

Postcards and Portraits

On Monday 20th I took a day's holiday from working at the zoo, as I had an afternoon and evening of arty stuff arranged. Primarily I was to do an art demonstration in the evening, but I drove up after lunch to meet up with Kate (Marketing) at the Nature In Art Museum and Art Gallery. I also hoped I would be able to view the Postcard Portraits exhibition. I am unable to pop up to Gloucester as I used to do and now have to try and combine as much as I can into one trip; I had missed out so far on seeing this exhibition, which was to end soon, so I was really hoping I could view it.

As usual the driveway leading to Wallsworth Hall, where the Nature In Art Museum and Art Gallery is housed, gave me a deep sense of calm as I drove into it. I don't know what magic it holds, but I always feel myself relax as I go along their access lane.

Kate very kindly gave me a couple of hours of her time to show me some computing apps she uses. I have long thought of doing an e.newsletter to send out to those on my mailing list to apprise them of upcoming events, workshops, news etc but have never got round to it, mainly through lack of time to set it all up. But Kate had told me of a free app that she uses for the museum, so I was keen to see how she uses it and whether it was suitable for me and what I want to to. I was originally supposed to be at Nature In Art for the weekend but the 2 day batik course I was to tutor was cancelled as sadly there just wasn't enough people booked to make it viable for Nature In Art to run. So the Monday had been booked weeks ago with the thinking I would already be in Glos. 

After looking over the computer apps with Kate, I was able to go upstairs to the gallery in which the Postcard Portrait exhibition was on show.  As the Museum is shut on Mondays to the public, I was the only person there apart from Simon, the Director, and Kate. 

There are over 200 Postcard Portraits... each an original artwork donated to Nature in Art by 200 artists that have associations with the Museum. This is a great fund-raising idea which they have done once before (I also had a Postcard in that). The same number of tickets are sold as there are Postcard Portraits and at the end of the exhibition each Portrait and ticket are matched up by the numbers that had been allocated but kept secret and then the owner of the ticket gets that Portrait. So for the price of a £20 ticket there is s possibility of owning an original artwork by the likes of well-known and famous wildlife artists such as Guy Combes, Andrew Denman, Julie Askew, Gary Hodges, David Shepherd, Martin Ridley to mention just a very few. But you won't know what you get until the end of the exhibition. What a fantastic 'Lucky Dip' Fundraiser.

In the photo, my little oil study of Paseka, one of the elephant calves I met in Botswana, can be seen in the nearest framed selection (in the middle, second from the bottom). I have also bought a ticket, so I have to wait and see whose Portrait I get.. it's very exciting.

After viewing the exhibition I went over to the Atrium which is the Educational block in the grounds of Nature In Art, to where my art demonstration was to take place that evening. The art group that had booked me was the Gloucestershire Society of Artists (GSA). I had set everything up earlier in the day so now Kate came over with me to set up the video camera and projector. The GSA  don't actually record the demonstration but just project it onto one of the white walls so that those towards the back can see what I am doing. The camera is focused in the piece of work, so my brush work can be viewed as I do it.

I did a little work before they group started to arrive, to 'warm myself up' and get my mindset back into the painting. I was working on a lion portrait that I started back at the beginning of May and it is the same one I used for the Demonstration I did in Thornbury, earlier this month. I shall post a photo of it here soon, hopefully as a step by step, so that you can see the progress.

There was quite a crowd who attended that evening, over 50 people; some of whom I knew and it was lovely to see their faces there and chat to them again. I thoroughly enjoyed the evening; again the response was very positive and I had some great questions asked throughout. I hope I have inspired some to try oils again, there were one or two that had given up on them or were about to, but seem enthused when they saw how I worked with the medium. 

It was a late night by the time I got home and unloaded the car, so I was glad I had taken the following day as holiday too, to prepare for the two workshops I was doing with school children and the Avon Gorge and Downs Wildlife Project on the Thursday and Friday. More of that in my next post.