Christmas Cards 2020

 

This time I’m not posting about a painting of any type. Since 2016, I’ve been in the habit of drawing, and occasionally painting, my own Christmas Cards. I don’t sell these, they’re just something I like to do for my friends and family.

I tend to do most of them with an ink pen. Ink sketching is something I really enjoy, and I’m probably more skillful when it comes to sketching with an ink pen than I am when it comes to making cards with watercolours. For one thing you are working on a very small scale, and I find it’s far easier to get details right with a pen than with a brush. I really like the monochrome look, similar to a Victorian engraving, which you can get with an ink pen too. Which probably explains the subject matter that I like to choose.

I’m useless when it comes to making something completely out of my own head. I have to see what I’m sketching. So for a lot of the cards I take my ideas from. . . well, from original Victorian engravings. Few of these are actually taken from original Christmas cards, but for the most part they’re illustrations that have appeared in magazines or books.

Usually I use A5 blank white cards which I buy from a well-known internet auction site (other well-known internet auction sites are available). However, earlier in the year my youngest daughter obtained a pack of square blank cards, a bit smaller than A5, from somewhere, and bought me a pack, so I’ve started by using these. I scanned the before I inscribed Merry Christmas on them because it’s possible I may want to use these images again for another purpose. So, if you’re ready, here’s the first batch of 2020 cards:-

Yes, the traditional bringing in of the Christmas pud. It’s so huge in this one I can’t help wondering whether the lady’s old man is hiding inside it. Leaving aside the facetious comments, it can be tricky getting children’s faces right when you’re working on such a small scale. Still, at least it helped me get my eye in. Yesterday I worked at a fairly furious pace to produce 8 cards.

Working like this did at least mean that I had my eye ‘in’ for the next card. This is possibly my favourite of the cards I made yesterday. It’s such a simple idea (and not mine, as I said earlier), but the silhouette against the snowy foreground works beautifully, and I also really like the way the clouds and sky have been rendered. Using horizontal lines like that says about 1920s to me, but I’m always open to being informed otherwise.

Carol singers are, I find, a fruitful field in which to find useful images to copy, and in particular, Dickensian era carol singers, be they well meaning toffs like these, or harmless, humble yokels like in a couple of the cards I made for 2019.

This next design originally dates from 1900. I just really liked the cheeky faced chap with the mistletoe. To me, that sort of thing is perhaps just on the right side of twee. Being critical, this is probably my least favourite of the cards I produced yesterday since, with the girl and her dog in particular, it’s not brilliantly executed.

I enjoy sketching reindeer, and it’s not so hard to find old engravings and line drawings to work from. This one is part of an illustration from a Victorian or Edwardian magazine, I would guess, which shows a whole group of reindeer, of which this is just one. To my way of looking at it, you really can’t go wrong with reindeer for Christmas cards – pulling a sleigh, lying down, standing up, whatever you do you can’t go wrong, although the hatching and cross hatching to produce the fur is always an interesting challenge.

Of course, if it’s true that you can’t go wrong with reindeer, then it’s even more true that you can’t go wrong with Santa. This rather old fashioned Santa is just based on a rather old painted illustration of the lad himself. I was tempted to paint, but if I do paint any of this year’s cards I’m much more likely to do so on the A5 cards when they arrive.

In past years I’ve always tried to do at least some of the cards by using more old fashioned representations of the American Santa of wonderful illustrators like Thomas Nast, and the old English Father Christmas. This is a more traditional Father Christmas. I don’t know exactly where and when the original illustration that I copied was made, but the clues that it’s English are that long, pointy hood, liberally adorned with holly, that he’s wearing, and the fact that he’s not shown bringing round toys for the kids, but spreading good cheer with food and drink. In the original, he’s carrying a large, dead bird by its neck, but I didn’t like this, so I sketched him with a bottle of falling down water instead.

I really like this next Santa. I’ll be honest, I don’t know how old the original is, but I like the humour behind it – poor old Santa confronting the obstacles posed by the demise of the Victorian chimney pot. We always used to tell our children that Santa had a magic key which opened everyone’s doors so he could get in even if they didn’t have a chimney. Looking at the picture, the style of is coat suggests a little bit of a more old-fashioned Santa, but I think it’s quite a bit more modern than the previous.

Those 8 cards I made yesterday. I got up this morning, my drawing hand felt fine, and so I made these last couple this morning. I liked this rather bucolic carol orchestra, similar in a way to the choirs I’ve used in other cards. I know that if any of us were magically transported back in time to mid-Victorian times, for all the Dickensian trappings we’d find it a pretty grim and horrible place to be compared with our own lives, but there’s no denying the appeal of the images.

Number 10 then, and we’re back to the reindeer. Again, not from an original Christmas card, merely a book or magazine illustration. I always enjoy making cards like this one, because of the intricacy and the level of challenge.

That’s my first 10 3030 cards, then. I don’t have specific recipients in mind yet, but every year I produce more cards, and yet every year there’s requests from my nearest and dearest if they can have one of my cards to give to someone, and I never have any left over by the end. That’s the way, uh huh, uh huh, I like it.

Acrylic on A4 paper Horse Racing Painting: 2

 Here's where I left the painting yesterday:-

I wasn't sure whether I was going to leave it until next Saturday, but after a good lunch this afternoon, I felt the urge to complete it.

The big job was painting in the stands, but that honestly didn't take a huge amount of time. The houses and the stands on the extreme right followed, and then the figure by the stands and his car. After that it was just filling in fiddly little bits, and finessing some of what I did yesterday.

Is it the best thing I've ever painted? No. On a subject like this, which has a lot of horses in it, I'd want a bigger canvas rather than a piece of A4 acrylic paper, which I've used for this. But it's quite nice, if I'm honest. This is the finished picture - see what you think yourself.

Acrylic on A4 paper project :1)

 Yes, you thought you'd got off lightly today, didn't you? Well, the thing is, I finished the large canvas board painting so quickly today, and the painting mood was still upon me. Being a little short on canvasses earlier today, I decided to do a smaller painting on paper. I have a couple of pads of acrylic paper I was either given or bought some time ago, and I've used it for watercolour before, but never for acrylics, so there was a challenge. I thoroughly enjoyed painting the horse race, so I decided to stick with the theme.

I began, of course, by sketching out the composition on the paper.

One of the thingd i like about this scene is that it is from this year, and all of the jockeys are wearing face masks - although at least one of them hasn't got his nose in it - naughty boy. Using acrylics always gives you the choice of using it thickly, like oil paint, or using it watered down, like watercolour. I started with the sky, in watercolour mode.

Now, I do like he dramatic sky here, but even though I'd stretched the paper and taped it down to the board prior to applying any paint, the paper looked awfully wrinkly . I crossed my fingers that it would smooth out as it dried. I went much thicker with the turf, but in all honesty it's very difficult guage how effective it will be at this stage of a painting.

Now, okay, by rights, if I was being disciplined about the painting, then I would have done the rest of the background before starting on the horses and jockeys. But look, this wee A4 painting is really just forfun, and for a challenge. If it sells when it's finished, whoop de do, but it won't bring a lot anyway. I wanted to paint the horsies and the jockeys next. . . so I did.

I was, at least, sensible enough to paint in the starting gates and the sky bet sign to the left of the nearest jockey and horse. My thoughts at this stage were - well, I know I always think my paintings are rubbish when I'm in the early stages like now. . . but this one really IS rubbish. Thankfully, I've learned to ignore that voice. I painted in the bodies of the other horses.

This was a nice stage in the process since you can see each of the 4 horses at a different stage of completion - the furthest left is complete and so is the jockey, with only the tack and the reins needing work. The second horse is finished bar the tack, but the jockey is unpainted. The third horse is in the stage of having layers of shading built up, and the 4th horse has only just had one layer of colour applied as yet. 

Having completely painted all 4 horses, and started work on the rest of the jockeys, I'd reached the stage where I started to really like the way that the painting was turning out. In a way, I was a bit sorry at this stage that I hadn't used a 20x16 canvas board for this scene, since bigger allows you to do more with the detail, But then, if this had been that much bigger I wouldn't have been able to come half this far in just the one session. Incidentally the sky was well dry by this point, and I was relieved to see that the paper had smoothed out nicely. 

So this is where I've finished for today. Horses and jockeys are done, and for a final flourish I painted in the trees to the right. 

Acrylic Painting Horse Racing Project:3

 So, if you were with me last week, you might remember that I really pushed on with my horsie painting and by the end of Saturday's session this is how far I'd got:-

Looking at the photograph, there's really two obvious areas which were unfinished - the turf and the crowd. I didn't do any work on the painting last Sunday, so it was only today that I took up my brushes again. The plan, which I stuck to, was to work on the turf from left to right, then paint in the shadows beneath the horses. To be honest, this sort of job is a bit of a monotonous task, but it's best to take your time, have patience, and plug away at it until it's done, telling yourself that although this is not the most enjoyable part of painting, it should make your picture look better. 

When I'd painted in the shadows on the grass, there was only really the crowd left to do. Experience from painting my commission of Frankel the wonder horse, and my Racing from Newmarket picture, I knew you can get good results from minimal detail with the crowd, so that's pretty much what I went for. 

All in all it took less than two hours to finish - and that's including the time it took to hang up a load of washing and put another load in the machine. I'm pleased with the finished painting, but then I usually am when I finish a painting, so I'll keep coming back to it to get a more objective appraisal over the next month or two

Acrylic Project: Horse Racing Painting:2

 Here's where I was at the end of last week's first session on this painting.

You know, I’ve been looking forward to getting back to this painting all week. At the start of the day I was desperate to start painting the horses, but for once I managed to curb by natural impulse to go at it like a bull at a gate. The plan all along has been to paint in the advertising boards below the rails, and you can see this in this first of today's photos.

There’s still a little bit of work to do on the Vauxhall lettering, which need just a few dark shadows, but that will have to wait until my next session.

This meant I could start on the nearer of the two horses. The photo demonstrates the way I went about this. I started with a very light, watery layer, which I gradually darkened to build in areas of shadow, which gave the horse’s muscles their definition. The yellow ochre on the left foreleg was only meant to lie underneath the darker colour I was going to apply on top of it, however, as I built up the other layers on the parts of the horse surrounding it, the more it occurred to me that the ochre itself could well do the job.

The next photo shows exactly where it was I reached Deception Point 2. 

With apologies to Dan Brown, from whom I nicked the name, Deception Point 1 is the point in the painting process where you start to think that what you are producing is rubbish and should be thrown away. Deception Point 2 is the point where you start to think you’re producing an amazing piece of work. Both feelings are of course very deceptive, hence the name. Still, with the horse’s head painted, I could for the first time start to get a feel of what the finished painting might look like. Which was as good a point as any to break for lunch.

After lunch the temptation was to crack straight on with the second horse. Yet I made myself wait so that I could apply finishing touches to the horse, and in particular paint in the reins and tackle. 

Be honest, don’t those few small details, like the orange reins, the blue and red bands beneath the saddle, make a difference?

So now I could concentrate on the second horse.

This photo demonstrates the method I was using. I painted the legs and head with a thin layer of yellow ochre, while the body and neck were painted a darker brown mixed with crimson, and watered down. I’d already built up quite a lot of the shadows by the time I took this, and the darker shadows saw me mixing the dark brown with some pthalo blue. By this stage I’d spent maybe 4 and a half hours today, but I could see me easily achieving my target of painting boards and both horses today.

This is where I finished for the day after about 6 hours’ work all told. Not only are both horses painted in, but so are parts of the crowd, done a little remedial ork on the sky by the horse's head on the right and I’ve also started working on the grass. One more good session of anything between three and four hours should see a finish.

Acrylic Project: Horse Race Painting

Yes, my friends, I enjoyed spending a proportion of the last two weekends making an acrylic painting so much, that I've started another one this week. Last time out I painted a Glasgow tram. Well, I don't want to saturate the market, as it were, so this time out I'm making another horse racing painting. 

It's a funny thing. I don't bet on horse races (apart from the Grand National - last time I had the winner was 1991). I don't watch horse racing. If I were to list my favourite sports, horse racing would, I'm sorry, be closer to the bottom than the top of the list. But I enjoy painting horse racing scenes. I'm not really sure why that should be. Still, I do enjoy painting horse races, and I've not done badly with these paintings over the years. I've sold every acrylic horse racing painting I've ever made, and was also commissioned to do a painting of Frankel the wonder horse too.

I was late starting this morning - so late, in fact, that it was just about the afternoon. I was sketching, you see. Still, when I put down the ink pens and picked up the pencil, I sketched the basic composition onto the canvas.

I set out to make the horses and the jockeys larger than in any painting I've made before. They aren't as big as I envisaged they would be, but I like the size they are oin this composition. 

Compared with other race paintings I've made , the background is pretty uncomplicated with this one - sky above, grass below, not a lot in between. So I made the decision to paint the base for the sky and the grass to begin.

Both sky and especially the grass will need a lot more painting before we're finished, but I was glad to get this down to start. 

One of the things which makes horse racing paintings fun to paint is the brightness of the jockeys' silks, and so this was what I really planned to concentrate on for pretty much the rest of this painting session.

One of the reasons for only putting on a very light coat of paint for both sky and ground is that when I start applying full, bold colour to the jockeys' silks, they really start to pop out from the canvas.

I got this far, and had to make the decision whether I was going to start on the horses. With the best will int he world, I wouldn't have finished them tonight, even if I rushed, so I decided to just paint the basic emerald green of the cloth beneath the saddles, and then leave it there for today. So this is how far we've got today:-

 We're at the stage here where I have to tell myself that it will look completely different once the Horses have been painted, and the after that, when the backgrounds have been properly painted in. When I start the next session I'll have a couple of decisions to make. Shall I go for the horses, or do more work on the background? I'm certainly planning to do the advertising boards and the railings, probably before I tackle the horses.