2022 Direct Watercolour Challenge - 7 and 8

 Two more direct watercolours today - here's number 7

Number 7) Caernarvon Castle - North Wales

I visited Caernarfon Castle on Monday with my daughter Jess and my son in law Dan. I've never been to North Wales before, and it was a great day. As well as the star turn, visiting the castle, we also took a short drive across the Britannia Bridge to Anglesey and the village of Llanfairpwllgwyngvllgogrechwrndrobyllantisilogogogoch. I don't guarantee that I've got the spelling right. 

Number 8 - Long John Silver

This is one of my favourite characters from literature, Long John Silver. Fair play to old Robert Louis Stevenson, he could write a bit when he put his mind to it. 

So it turns out that I haven't got Tenniel and Alice out of my system yet

 Pretty much what it says up there. I did think that what with starting the 30 x 30 challenge pretty much all of my art time was going to be taken up with making the paintings. Yet last night, I sat down with the telly, and the itch began. Same thing again this morning. So here's the latest 2 copies - both are from Looking Glass.

2022 Direct Watercolour Challenge - number 6

 

Number 6 - Horse Race

After the success of the last painting - my direct watercolour of Margam Castle, I decide to go for another where I paint the whole scene rather than just the main detail. In the last year's challenge I might well have just painted the lead horse and the jockey. The way that I did this was to pain the green field, and the blue sky first, covering the whole length of the paper. This has it's benefits and also its drawbacks as well. The benefits are that I really like the evenness of the texture of the sky. The drawback is that it means you're painting the details of the horses and jockeys on top of the blue sky. It's difficult to make the colours really pop. Nonetheless, I'm really pleased with the way it's come out. There's something about horse racing which I find very appealing as a subject to paint. I never watch horse racing, and don't even bet on the Grand National every year like I used to. But as a subject for painting, I love it. 

2022 30x30 Watercolour Challenge

 Okay, so for today's number 3, I took the prompt from Sketching Every Day, which was featured artist Pat Katz. Pat Katz is a Canadian artist whom I wasn't previously familiar with, but I think she's just great. This is my direct watercolour copy of an original Pat Katz. Nowhere near as good as the original of course, which I suggest you search for and see for yourself. 

This I actually made a couple of days ago. Today I made the next two. An upcoming prompt for tomorrow on Sketching Every Day is Toulouse Lautrec. This is what I've made: -

I think that you should always try to be objective when you look at your own work, but I can't help being really pleased with the way this one came out. I decided at first that I wasn't going to copy a painting or poster, and so I found a black and white photograph of the lasd himself. In previous years I've had some success painting from old photos using monochrome blue, and so I gave the whole piece of paper a light blue wash, and then painted the face on the left. It was quick, and I was so pleased with the way it turned out it suddenly occurred to me to copy the poster onto the right, and make it look as if the poster is ripped at the top. I'm really pleased with the result. The scan has made the silhouetted man on he poster grey when it is actually mauve, but still, I'm really happy to have made something I really like so early in the challenge.

Going for a lap of honour, then, I made this painting of Port Talbot's local stately home, Margam Park. I own it actually. Well, sort of. The council actually owns it, but as a ratepayer in Port Talbot, that's pretty much the same thing, isn't it?

Again, I'm really pleased with this. It looks like it's meant to look - and I'm not used to that happening much with my watercolours. After saying this it will probably all be downhill from here, but I've completed one sixth of the challenge, and the Sean Connery is probably the weakest so far, and even that does lok like him (a bit). 

(Mock) Mock Turtles

 Right, so yesterday evening, after I put the watercolours away, I was watching TV and very often, when I'm watching I'll sketch with a pen at the same time. I thought to myself - what haven't I done with regards to the Alice books yet? Tenniel alone produced getting on for 100 illustrations for the two books altogether. One thing that occurred to me was that I haven't done the mock turtle yet. So I made this copy last night.

It really is the archetypal image of the Mock Turtle, and for me serves as something of a good demonstration of he imaginative genius of Tenniel. Carroll's own drawing of the Mock Turtle for 'Alice's Adventures Underground', the original handmade manuscript that he gave to Alice Liddell, it looks like a seal wearing plate armour. In the description n "Alice in Wonderland"  it says "I don't even know what a Mock Turtle is."

"It's the thing Mock Turtle Soup is made from," said the Queen." Back in the day, green turtle soup was looked on as a delicacy. Thankfully we know better now. Due to the scarcity of turtles - hardly surprising since humans kept making them into soup, mock turtle soup was made of an alternative, using ground beef and offal. Hence Tenniel's decision to give his mock turtle attributes of both cow and turtle. 

This conception of the character has proven difficult for illustrators who came after to get away from. Here's my copy of dear old Arthur Rackham's

Again, it is instantly recognisable as the Mock Turtle, because it is pretty much the same in all the essentials as Tenniel's. Coming forward in time four decades, we have my copy of Mervyn Peake's conception of the character, here dancing around Alice with the gryphon:-

Superficially it's different. Once again Peake uses the strategy of using movement, which does have the effect of making his illustrations look different from Tenniel's. Instead of giving the character 2 turtle flippers and two cow legs, he gives him  human limbs instead. I'd dare say that the head is a sheep's rather than a cow's. Even so, though, the shell and the head are still obeying the Tenniel convention of a creature combining domesticated mammal and turtle attributes.

I don't know if Ralph Steadman drew the Mock Turtle for his Alice in Wonderland, but I haven't been able to find a copy of it if he did. All of which meant that I was beginning to despair of finding an illustration of the character other than Tenniel's which metaphorically blew my socks off. Then I came to Charles Robinson again. This is my copy of his illustration:-

Can you believe that this was made in 1907? Charles Robinson's illustrations for Alice in Wonderland are well worth finding. Some of them are very simple, and look unremarkable. Others, though, are stunning demonstrations of graphic illustration decades ahead of his time. In Robinson's illustration, the mock turtle looks like a real turtle, but what an illustration it is. 

2022 30x30 challenge 2022

 This one is a response to today's prompt in Sketching Every Day on Facebook. The prompt is 'shaken, not stirred', although I did quip that mine should possibly be called 'Shaken not Shtirred'. My scanner really doesn't do me any favours with colours - anything blue is either made grey or white, and anything with even a hint of yellow is exaggerated. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

2022 30x30 Watercolour challenge 1) Disused Station

 Here we are, gentle readers, the one you probably haven't been waiting for, my first direct watercolour of 2022:-

Direct watercolour means that you don't get to do any sketching before you start painting - the only medium you can use for your picture is watercolour. I have to say that I'm pretty pleased with this. In my humble opinion it is actually a wee bit better than it looks here. There's something about my scanner that it just doesn't deal with blues very well, so the roofs and the platform edges really haven't come out as well as they did. So here's a photograph I took of the same, which should give you just a wee bit of a better idea about the true colours of the picture -

As I said yesterday, I know that this isn't exactly world class, but it is so much better than some of the pigswill I've made in previous years of the challenge. 

Now, that looks a lot better, doesn't it.