wrapping up the explorations...

I think I am done hauling out wee explorations for show and tell. I am working on some new stuff and I will show you that in the days to come.

The above small study is one I rather like (3" x 4", cps on Colourfix paper). Yes there are a few things that need tweaking but as a quick, improvisational piece it worked for me. Some day I might create a larger image using this study as inspiration.

When we moved here, I was thrilled to discover that we had so many varieties of flowering shrubs and trees. The honeymoon is over. While I am still thrilled to enjoy the beauty and the scent of the blossoms, it is the reality of maintenance that is hitting us. Shrubs keep on growing until they are unruly, seriously unruly. We spent the past weekend cutting back shrubs that have become bushy trees!!!! Maybe buying a property from people who were retired and enjoyed gardening wasn't such a great idea. :-)  Every summer the weeds and overgrowth get ahead of us. One of the many reasons I like winter. LOL

more exploring...

Wine Glass Trees, 4"x 3", coloured pencil on Colourfix paper
copyright Teresa Mallen

 

Here are two more examples of my 'exploring' adventures from recent months...the one above is a small study that started off with some stylized trees. The trees eventually ended up looking like wine glasses. I am wondering if the fact that I like to take a glass of wine to the studio some afternoons, might not have had some influence here?!

My husband has been making wine in recent years. He has a grape crusher and a wine press and in the fall he lines up at a shop with the elderly Italian men in Ottawa's 'Little Italy', to buy the variety of grapes he has chosen. This means we have lots of tasty, inexpensive wine readily available!  Oh and my husband is not an elderly Italian gentleman, in case it read that way... :-)

 

 

 

The work above is very small, just 3.5 inches by 2.5 inches. It is a bright and  fanciful landscape and I completed several others in a similar fashion. Some got downright garish!

 

watch me work

'Red Trees', 4" x 4", coloured pencil, copyright Teresa Mallen

 

On Wednesday January 9th, 2013, I shall be the guest artist at the Kanata Art Club evening meeting. My presentation shall be an inspiring look into the world of coloured pencil. First up will be an overview on how to create fine art with cps. After reviewing traditional coloured pencil techniques, I will reveal how to go beyond these basics, sharing how to create work on coloured paper that looks like pastel, how to create richly pigmented effects, how to work in mixed media with coloured pencil as well as how to move beyond realism.

 

As part of my presentation, I shall demonstrate how I created the above piece. I have a fresh piece of paper with a new line drawing on it and my pencils are sharpened. Come watch me work! 

 

This event takes place in West Ottawa, 1030 Riddell Drive at the Kanata Montessori School. Start time is 7:00 p.m. and non-members are welcome to attend. Hope to see you there!



more recent little gems

I read a blog post a few years ago written by an artist whose name or work I don't remember. But I do remember that the blog author was putting together a show at her studio. As part of the marketing strategy, the artist was offering up small studies done for larger works as well as some small pieces that the artist had left unframed. She called these pieces her "little gems". I liked that and thought that if I ever did something similar then I too would label such works little gems. I had some of these studies available for viewing at my recent open studio exhibition. They were not for sale but these and others like them will be my 'little gems' offerings on the next tour. I also plan to set up a shop on my website for these small pieces...once I have enough done that is.

The above abstract is 5 inches wide by 2 3/4 inches high. It is coloured pencil applied to coloured Colourfix pastel paper.

3" w x 4.5 " h, coloured pencil on Colourfix paper

People who have looked at this piece have commented that it makes them think of waves or the ocean. When I had finished it, it reminded me of the yarn in a chunky sweater! But yes, I can see the waves too. :-)  This pieces is 6" by 3", coloured pencil on coloured Colourfix paper.

The above photo simply doesn't do this tiny piece justice. Getting good lighting in the dead of winter isn't easy. I wasn't about to photography this outside as it was overcast and storming and being by a window didn't help much. Blech...Anyway, this one is a very small square, 2 1/4" x 2 1/4".

My recent landscapes have all included striped soil! I have no idea why striped hillsides are coming forth but I am liking the look.

Coloured Pencil on coloured Colourfix paper, 4.5" x 2 3/4", copyright Teresa Mallen

As today is January 1st, I would like to wish you a Happy New Year. May we all enjoy a blessed, prosperous and creative year in 2013!

new works in progress

peony petals, work in progress, coloured pencil on Stonehenge paper, 8" x 8"

I hope everyone is enjoying a wonderful holiday season. Things are great here. I am not a hustle and bustle kind of gal so the last place anyone would find me is out hitting the shops for after Christmas bargains. Instead, I have been spending delightful days in my studio.

The above image is of a piece that I started this week. It will become part of my 'petals' series. Once again I am working from my stash of peony pictures as a drawing reference. I wanted to work small for a change and this one is just 8 inches by 8 inches. I am also enjoying a return to Stonehenge paper after months of working on sanded pastel surfaces. It is fun to change things up now and again. 

While I normally don't have several pieces on the go at once, the drawing below is one that I am getting back to after a bit of an absence.

Solomon's Seal, work in progress, coloured pencil on Colourfix paper, 8" x 8"

This drawing of a Solomon's Seal plant is rather small as well. It has been shelved for a while as I had tried different approaches to the background and I wasn't satisfied. This morning I erased most of my funky background and decided to try going with something more simple. I have just started adding some replacement pigment and I plan on heating the wax to fill in the tooth of the paper. I shall keep you posted on how this progresses.

Finally here is a fun mixed media piece that I have been noodling with. I am working on a sheet of Colourfix pastel paper and the art itself will be cropped to 22 inches by 15.5 inches. Right now I have a base of watercolour paint down as well as some coloured pencil. Oh, and the image is my interpretation of the underside of a yellow mushroom - something for my abstracted realism series.



mushroom gills (abstracted) , work in progress, mixed media, 22" x 15.5"

So, there is much fun going on in the studio. Winter is my favourite time to log in hours working as I am unable to grow food or tend gardens and I am not distracted by the long lovely daylight hours. Having said that, I am now going to grab my snowshoes for a walk in the forest before we put the goats into the barn at dusk. We had a winter snowstorm yesterday and every branch is coated with snow and topped with sparkling crystals. I simply can't stay inside any longer. :-)

Happy New Year everyone. I wish you peace and many blessings in 2012!

simply pears, new cp work in progress

Time for a new piece and for a change from flowers I decided on fruit. I grabbed some pears and headed outside for a bit of a photo shoot. I must admit that my photos leave something to be desired as I was rushing things. My initial thoughts were that I would like to do a simple, rather stark, contemporary piece. I would have liked to use quartz or granite counter tops as a surface but as I don't have either of those in my house I used my old faithful marble pastry board instead. A lot of great pie dough has been rolled out on that marble! Humm...how about a pear tart? Oops, I digress...

The above photo is one of my not so great reference photos but that's okay as I cropped it anyway. I created a drawing and the image below shows how it looked once I transferred my drawing to my paper and started adding colour.


I chose an olive green sheet of Colourfix paper to work on. I wanted a change from white Stonehenge and I wanted to work on something sanded. The piece is approximately 7 1/2" x 10 1/2" in size. If you haven't tried coloured paper and you are not sure how to transfer a drawing to a coloured surface (or to a paper that is too thick to use a light box) please click here for a description of how to do it. Just scroll down to the question section.

In the above photo, I have put down three different pencil colours to make up the background. The pears are untouched and are still the colour of the paper. I started in on the marble with a first layer of pigment. Then I started to wing it when I should have proceeded with caution. The picture doesn't show what I did next.

After stopping to take a photo, I decided to tackle depicting the dark veins in the marble. I also decided to bump up the detail in the marble to make it more striking (and more like granite). So I started in applying dark streaks all over the place. I wasn't sure it was working but I kept going. Well, when I was finished I knew it didn't work. It was just too busy for the simplicity of the piece. And uh oh, I had got quite carried away and there was a lot of pigment down! Darn.

So I got out my tape and I started to lift...and lift...and lift. It wasn't coming off evenly but hey maybe another layer of pigment would cover it. I tried that. Nope, now it was worse - a real streaky mess. So back to the lifting. Finally I decided that this wasn't doing the job so I reached for my electric eraser. I had hesitated to use it as I thought it might remove the sanded texture of the paper. But hey, things were looking too awful to leave it the way it was. You know what? It worked! Like a charm. Yippee! The lesson I relearned here was that when things really don't seem to be working, stop and assess what is happening. I should have done a test on a scrap bit of paper to see if I liked the marble look. I was impatient and I paid the price. Lifting and erasing took too much time and was quite boring.

So I continued on and started in on the pears.



So at this point, there is still work to be done. I haven't finished the pears (you can still see the green paper at the bottom of the front pear), the shadows are not done and I shall tweak the new non-marble background colour. I should have stopped to take a picture of the awful 'marble' background before I erased it. It was truly hideous! :-)

Now for some garden photos...yarrow

More yarrow...I love yellow in my gardens.

For some shocking pink, good ol' phlox.

I shall show you the finished pears in my next post.

The moral of this post is that sometimes it is best just to keep things simple...oh and slowing down to do a test strip saves time in the long run.

'Neptune's Leaves' - finished!

'Neptune's Leaves', Coloured Pencil on Colourfix Paper, 22" x 16"

Copyright Teresa Mallen

'Neptune's Leaves' is finally finished. I redid some veins to improve their placement and I finished the background. When doing the background, I applied pigment and then used a stiff brush to grind the pigment into the paper. This technique gives a look similar to what I would get if I used solvent.

After taking several photos, in different locations, with varying light conditions, using many settings on the camera, this photo is the best I could come up with. Keep in mind that the inside of the leaves are more of a coral colour in real life. I am going to try scanning it to see if I can get a more correct image for my website.

To read about my inspiration for this piece and what I was aiming for, you can click here which will take you to an earlier post. Now I just need to clean up all the pigment that has been flying around while I worked on this sanded surface and I shall be ready to start my next project. For a change of pace, I am returning to Stonehenge paper and I think it is time to do a flower, well at least part of a flower...

New Coloured Pencil WIP...

Ah, making decisions and planning. This what I have been doing for several days. I was ready to start a new work and I had in mind that I would do a snowy image. I had several photos that were inspiring me. The one above is an example of what I was looking at. After scanning the photos (they were taken years ago with a film camera) and playing with them on the computer I found that I just wasn't moved to go any further.

What to do now? I got out my boxes of pictures and my CDs of digital images and I spent hours looking at the photos. At the same time, I was pondering the issue of colour. I mulled over concepts like temperature, intensity, hue and value. I refreshed my art history knowledge by going over the stylistic changes during the periods of Fauvism, Expressionism, Modernism and so on. I found that this reviewing of photos and reviewing art history was taking not just hours but days.

What evolved from this thinking and exploring was a desire to try to control the process more in my next work. Having just finished my funky chard piece, I was keen to work on another large image, again on a sanded coloured paper. When I worked on that piece, the colours in the chard just happened. For the most part I just flowed along with the direction the work seemed to be going in and I am happy with the way it turned out. But, for a change of pace, I started to think, what if I controlled the process this time?

I found myself interested in doing a botanical piece, specifically leaves and I went back over all of my photos, seeking an image that struck me as doable. That is where the next photo comes in.

Notice the yummy leaves on this wildflower? So what if I isolated these leaves? What if I played with them by rotating, flipping and reversing them? Here is a version that I ended up with that I really like.

Voila, a new reference image was born! Next, I became excited to apply some of my recent thoughts on colour. I had been thinking of doing a piece in which I eliminated (or at least downplayed) the light source - one of the stylistic outcomes of Modernism. Maybe, this piece was the one. And how about restricting my palette and controlling the colour but with a twist, this time not being at all true to the colours represented in the actual subject?

See where all those hours of pondering started to lead me? I love it!! Okay, so here is where I am at now...I have my subject. I have stared at it and stared at it. My imagination started to see the leaves as similar to leaves in ponds (think water lilies)...from here, I started to think of these leaves as being from some sort of underwater world. Using this concept, what colour would I make the leaves? I got out my pencils and played with combinations. Here is what I have come up with so far: the outside of leaves are to be a sort of light greenish blue, the inside of the leaves a coral colour, the background dark teal. Keeping in mind my desire to eliminate a light source, (which sort of goes with an underwater world idea) I will be ignoring the shadows indicated in the photo.

Please note that I am not attempting to have this look like it is an underwater picture. I am not going for realism here. The leaves should look like leaf shapes and the rest of the piece will be an abstraction from reality - like the Swiss Chard Mosaic piece.

So finally, after days of planning, I have a drawing started as well as some initial colouring done. As you can see from the photo, I am using green paper (sort of an olive green), and it is a sanded surface. Colourfix is the paper's brand name. Right now the image is approximately 22" x 16". I still have to decide what to draw into the negative space in the background.

As you can also see, I am using my laptop again (perched on my drafting table) for this piece. It allows me to zoom into the scanned image so that I can see it better.

My challenge in this piece will be to not draw the colours that I see before me. I have experimented on the coloured paper with my pencils to determine how I will create the coral shades and the teal etc. These pencils now make up my restricted palette.

The chard and now this piece seem to require more energetic music than I normally listen to. I have raided my husband's CD collection and the rock and roll is definitely doing the trick. I even ventured into some pop this afternoon and worked standing (so I could dance about while I worked). A very fun day in the studio, I must confess! :-)

And if all this wasn't enough to get excited about, today President Obama was in Ottawa. Needless to say, folks here are delighted and pleased as punch - not to mentioned honoured.

All in all, this piece has already involved quite a bit of thought and planning. I have loved every minute of it and I look forward to seeing how it all impacts the final work. So what about you, do you do a fair bit of planning or does your work just happen?

Finally, my blog headline says: add beauty to your life. Well my husband added much beauty to my week as he gave me several bunches of tulips for Valentine's Day. They are all over the house and of course I had to take several photos. I am very blessed.