Using your art to make calendars - Video Tutorials

I've made a couple of tutorial videos demonstrating how you can use any image saved to your PC or laptop - so any of your own pictures that you've scanned or photographed - to make a calendar using Microsoft word. You don't need any fancy or expensive design package to get decent results. Here's the links to the two short tutorial videos I made on YouTube: -

Using Your Sketches to make a calendar 1

Using Your Sketches to make a calendar 2

Plough horses . . . Finished

Yesterday I got this far:-

I said at the time that I reckoned that there was perhaps another 3 or 4 hours work to be done. That's proven to be an overestimation. I had quite a few people congratulate me on the finished painting - when it wasn't even finished. So I didn't touch the painting until artists' group this evening, and a couple of hours work was all that it took.

Now, you have to bear in mind that this one was photographed in artificial light, which is why the colours appear so different. Allowing for that though, can you see where the work went in to finishing the painting? No? Well, you can just about see the top of my signature on the bottom right, but ignoring that . . .
I worked on the straps and paraphernalia immediately behind the main horse's head.
There are more straps on the main horse's back
The straps behind the horse's rump have also been painted in. The furthest leg to the right has been painted in with shadows, and the hoof in the centre has had more detail applied.
Details of the plough between other legs have been painted in. 
I've applied some highlights to the mane of the horse on the left.
I've darkened some of the areas of soil, and lightened the green in the background on the right.
I've also applied some dots and shadows on the turned over soil.
I applied a very light level behind the main horse to give the appearance of a small cloud of dust.

Phew! All that in a couple of hours.

I usually love a new completed painting for at least a couple of hours, and then reality starts to set in. So I can't trust me feelings right now, which are telling me that this is one of the best things I've ever painted. But looking objectively, I made a painting of plough horses a couple of years ago. I loved it at the time, as did my mother, to whom I gave it as a present. But if we look at it now:-

- well, if we look at it now I still think it's a pretty nice painting - and it looks even better framed - but I honestly think that the latest painting is a better piece of work. As it should be. I'd only been painting at all for 2 years when I made this. I've got 2 more years' experience since then.

Plough horses painting - day four

I put in maybe another 4 hours work on the painting yesterday. I began with this:-

The rough plan of action was to work on the sky and try to get a smoother and more even application of paint. Following that, the idea was to paint in the main horse's head. Here's where I finished after arthritis stopped play yesterday: -

The sky looked better, although the left hand side was noticeably smoother than the right. I was delighted with the second horse's head, though, and kept on working downwards. Then I painted in most of the horse's body. The colours looked okay, but it was difficult to be sure how well they were working on the body until some of the strap work was painted in.
So today the plan was to work on the sky to the right of the background. Then to finish off the body of the horse, and do some work on the horse's left foreleg, and then the red bar , and as much work on the straps as I could. So this is where we are now:-

I reckon that there's maybe 3 or 4 hours work left in this. The straps and buckle and the rest of the tackle need finishing. Then there's work to do on the legs and the ploughshare. But I do think that we've reached the point where you can get a pretty clear idea of what the finished painting will look like.

Plough horse painting - day two

Okay - this is where I started today: -

I'll be honest, I was pleased with what I accomplished yesterday. Having taken a good hour and a half to make the sketch onto the canvas I was happy that I managed to paint in so much of the background. I still wanted to do some more work on the background. There's a patch of sparse foliage to the left of the horses where I'd made a start but hadn't finished it yesterday. I also wanted to have a go at toning down the yellow of the earth a bit.

Once I'd done that, though, I wanted to start on the head of the horse on the left. 

I'm really pleased with the work I did here. Yellow ochre and raw umber combined with a little dash of pthalo blue for the darkest shadows have worked wonders on the head. As I painted in the tackle, and the shadows, and the pink muzzle it just came more and more to life. I would have been quite happy to have stopped at this point, but I wanted to just try to paint in the front couple of legs. 

I haven't finished the legs. I like the blue grey shadows on the lower legs, but there's more work to be done in the next session - which I'm planning for tomorrow. 

Latest Project: Plough Horses

Yes, I've embarked upon another acrylic painting. Look, I only really have time to work on these during school holidays, weekends, and Wednesday evenings, so I haven't been resting on my laurels.

I enjoyed the last painting so much I decided to go horsey again, another 16x20 canvas board, but this time a pair of mighty plough horses. Here's the basic sketch onto canvas: - 

You might recall, if you've been following the blog for any great length of time, that I'm very much an amateur artist, and I've tended to paint like an amateur. One aspect of this is that I'm really not very disciplined. I'd go for the pleasure of painting the bits I enjoy most first, which in the case of a picture like this would be the horses. Well, following the last painting I've tried again to be a little more methodical, and so the immediate concern was to paint in the background:-

The sky is already quite nice considering that there's just the one layer of paint so far. It's a basic mixture of cerulean blue and white. The foliage is light green, mixed with white for the lighter patches. As for the ground, that's yellow ochre mixed with white. The much lighter patches are the same colour, but much diluted with water. The idea is that they will be painted over with some foliage. Here's where I ended yesterday's painting session after some more detailed work on the background:-

If you look at the patches of diluted yellow ochres and white, you'll notice that they are slightly duller and more brown now. I applied a very dilute layer of burnt umber. On the immediate right of the horses I've painted the rows of foliage, combining patches of light green lightened with white, pure light green, ad light green darkened with pthalo blue. This mixture of light green with pthalo blue is also what I used o darken the shadows on the trees in the background on extreme left and extreme right. One of the most noticeable additions in this last photo is the shadow beneath the horses. Also I've applied a dilute mixture of mars black and pthalo blue to the tail. 

It's taken I would say a good 4 hours to get to this stage

Harness Racing Painting

Sorry it's been a while. I've been without the internet for a week, so I just haven't been able to post. Still, it has at least allowed me to concentrate on finishing my latest acrylic. We left the painting here last time:-

You might recall that I was trying to do this painting 'properly' - that is, to not start painting in the horses until I'd finished the background . By this stage I'd go a nice effect with the trees, and found a green I could live with for the turf. So the next stage was to complete the horse in the foreground:-

I shan't lie to you, I do like painting horses very much. At first I wasn't sure that the colour combinations were quite right for this horse. but a combination of burnt ochre and burnt umber were actually pretty good. A little phalo blue added to my darkest raw umber gave me just what I was looking for for the shadows between the horse's forelegs. 

I do think that the horse which has been pretty much fully painted in by this photo is the most successful part of the whole painting. I used a similar combination of ochre and umber for the horse on the far right, although I went lighter just to distinguish it a little from the main horse. 

The horse to the immediate right of the main horse is a darker horse, and I'd started painting in one leg by this time, just to start to get an idea of the way that the different shades might interact with each other. However I did decide that I should probably paint in the jockey, the trap, and the horse and jockey on the extreme left before I concentrated on this horse.

The jockey is rather nicely painted, and he would come to stand out more once I painted in the darker horse behind him. The horse behind was darker anyway, and I thought that I would try to emphasise this. Looking at the next photograph I'm not entirely sure that this was the right way to go. Or rather, it is for the jockey in the foreground as it's very much brought out his head and upper body, but the horse behind is a but of a formless blob. Looking to the right you can see that I've applied a very watery base layer of a mixture of a little mars black, a little pthalo blue, a little china white and a lot of water.  

By the time I'd got this far the left hand side of the painting was pretty much completed. I'd done a little more work on the remaining horse, darkening some of the shadows on the rear leg. The idea when I was going to paint in the rest of the horse was to make it a mixture of blue-black, and dark browns as well. That was the idea, anyway.

Working left to right, I painted in the jockey and trap to the immediate right of the main horse. The dark horse to the right was going to prove to be a problem for me. Partly this was because of problems with the initial sketch. As I worked my way up the horse, applying paint to the head and neck, I came to realise that the head and neck were not proportioned correctly, so a lot of what I did before the next photograph was trying to correct this as best I could.

- and that's the finished painting. I did some more work trying to finesse the horse on the extreme right and extreme left, but that was it.

Harness Racing Painting

So, taking up the story from my last post, almost a fortnight ago I finished my last sketch to complete the one sketch a day challenge. One effect of this was that it freed up my Wednesday evenings at art group. For the last few months I've been concentrating on making either plain ink or ink and watercolour sketches which I could complete in an evening to take care of that day's sketch. Now that I've done it, I decided that it was high time to start another acrylic painting.

What to paint, though? Well, thinking back over the last couple of years, when it comes to large acrylic paintings, my favourite subjects have been trams, trolleys and streetcars; steam locomotives and racehorses and working horses. Well, my last painting was a tram, and the one before that a steam engine. So it looked like another horse racing painting would fit the bill. This time, though, I decided to do something slightly different, by panting a harness racing subject.

Starting this one I promised myself that I was going to work patiently, by which I meant that I was going to sketch the design first onto the canvas, and not put one speck of paint down before this was finished. Then I was going to paint in the backgrounds, and then and only then was I going to allow myself to paint the bits I actually really enjoy - the horses and the jockeys.

So I spent all of Wednesday 27th's Artist's Group session in just sketching the design, and even then worked on it for another half hour last Saturday.

Taking so much time, the ironic thing is that if this was just a pencil sketch or an ink sketch of the same size I would have put a lot more detail and shading into it. The canvas is too big to be scanned, ad pencil on my canvases just doesn't photograph all that clearly, still hopefully it should give you the gist of what I've been doing.

Last Saturday, then, having completed the sketch I put down a layer of fairly strong yellow for the turf. This was always going to be painted over, but I was hoping that glimpses of the underlying yellow would come through in some areas. Then with the trees in the background I began applying dabs of light green , some of a slightly more watery consistency than the others. The idea was to paint in shadows and other colours of the leaves on top of this for the trees.

In this photo you can see the basic mottled effect in the top middle, while I've begun to paint in shadows and more variegation on the left hand side. I'd also begun to apply a mixture of olive green and titanium white on top of the yellow on the turf.

The above photo represents between 5 and 6 hours of work. I put in another hour's work before Wednesday completing the green layer on the turf. On the Wednesday I finished the trees in the background, and I wasn't at all unhappy with the effect. A judicious application of pthalo blue in some of the shadows and a watery application of burnt sienna in one area created the look I wanted, and drew some appreciative comments from other artists there. However, the other side of the coin was that my attempt to rectify the turf by adding a thin layer of creamy yellow to the top just made it far, far worse.

So on Thursday evening, I put in another hour and a half's work, applying layers of two slightly different lighter greens, one of which has a very appealing emerald tint. After about half an hour I started to think that this might actually work, and after another hour this morning I was a lot happier.

This one shows you the trees in the background now, and gives you a good idea about the different shades of green in the turf. I put in a bit more work on the turf, applying some subtle shadows and some scuff marks, and then, wonder of wonders, at least 10 hours after I began working on it, I finally started to paint a horse.

This is where I am currently. The neck and head of the horse in the foreground, which are mostly combined different shades of burnt umber and yellow ochre, which I've started painting still need some work, but it's a joy to do. I don't know if I'll get time to do anything more before Wednesday, but I'll post an update when I can.

Where was I? Oh yes . . .

It's been a long time, hasn't it? Well, if you've been reading my posts for a while you'll know that much of the last 12 months has been taken up my one sketch a day for a whole year challenge. I actually successfully completed on Monday 25th March. You can see all of the sketches if you'd like over on my sister blog South Wales Urban Sketcher .

The upshot of all of this was that I haven't even started a new painting in acrylics since I finished painting a London Tram in the Autumn.

Since finishing the challenge, I didn't produce another sketch all week, and only did two on the Sunday because I'd already signed up for a South Wales USK visit to Llandaff Cathedral last Sunday.

Does this mean I have a new project on the go? Well . . .