‘Registered Animals’… and other exhibitions

Tags

art, exhibitions, nancy farmer, Royal Bath and West Show, spring farm arts

So… the last few days have been short on artwork, but rather long on cutting out pieces of cardboard, mounting up drawings, wrapping up prints, and quite boring things like that. The dining room currently looks like this:

…though now I think about it, it’s not usually much better than this.
I shall get back to the real artwork soon I hope, but for the moment a lot of this activity is because I will have work in a few exhibitions – including the ‘registered animals’ which I shall tell you about in a moment. So, in case, by some slim chance, you live just down the road from me, here’s what’s coming up:

• Spring Farm Arts open weekend, 26th – 27th May:
  This is the group of artists who live in my village – we throw open our studio doors every few times a year in Moorlinch, Somerset (UK). I shall be there all weekend with lots of my paintings, prints, etchings, coasters etc, etc. For more details see the Spring Farm Arts blog, or send me a message.
• Dove Studio End of Year Show, 26th May – 1st June:
  This is the studio where I do my etchings. I’ll have a couple of my etchings on display, along with many more prints by lots of other people, for more details please see Bronwen Bradshaw’s blog at http://bronwenbradshaw.wordpress.com/2012/05/13/dove-end-of-year-show-2012/
• The Art Pavilion at the Royal Bath & West Show, 30th May – 2nd June:
  I have submitted 3 pictures for this exhibition, two Poison Flower Fairies and an etching. Whether all or any end up in the exhibition on the day, I couldn’t say, but the show is – as they say – fun for all the family, so if you’re visiting, have a look in the art gallery: http://www.bathandwest.com/art-exhibition-floral-art/143/
• Somerset Life Magazine at the Royal Bath & West Show, 31st May:
  And finally, following a very successfully article about our Spring Farm Arts group by Somerset Life Magazine, they have invited us onto their stand – to add an air of local artiness. I shall be on their stand on Thursday 31st May, painting… probably the Vis-à-vis picture I showed you the sketch for. So, come and say hello, if you are also visiting.

So you see why actual artistic output has been a little curtailed this week…!

But here was something that made me smile – I had forgotten exactly which etching I had submitted to the Royal Bath and West show, and what price I had put on anything. No matter – I submitted on-line so the details must be visible somewhere, I thought. For those of you not familiar with this event, it’s a huge Westcountry agricultural show, with prizes awarded to cows and bulls and sheep and all sorts, including to cheeses. So, having logged onto the site, I find… after a bit of a search… that I can indeed see all my painting details by editing my ‘Registered Animals’ – seriously – see the screen shot below . I thought this was rather cute in the end, though I declined to buy them any hay or stabling….

My registered animals for the Royal Bath and West!

Sketch for a new masquerade painting: Vis-à-vis

Tags

art, mask, masquerade, sketch, work-in-progress

I have been working on a new masquerade piece – albeit a masquerade with a difference. Working out the actual composition always takes me the longest of time – I can spend days poking at the piece of paper in a desultory way, periodically wandering into the garden to pull out weeds, getting distracted, changing my mind about the subject, even occasionally getting on with paperwork, until at some point the sketch all starts to pull together. And then, I can actually get on with it!

masquerade sketch

Clicking on the images will allow you to see them bigger…

So, here is the completed sketch. More or less as the painting will be. Preparatory drawings are negligible or non-existent; with my compositions the battle more-or-less takes place with a pencil, a rubber and a single sheet of paper. This is probably bad practice but I can’t see it changing now.

masquerade sketch (detail 1)

detail of the masks behind this fellow’s back

As I said – a masquerade with a difference. You may observe that while most of the characters have a number of masks at their disposal, they do not have actual faces. A couple of years back I did an etching along these lines called ‘Two Faced’, but that was more stylized and less detailed: this picture may be more creepy in the end… or it may not… I shall have to wait and see how it turns out.

masquerade sketch (detail 2)

masks covering masks…

So far I think I shall call it ‘Vis-à-vis’ – an expression whose original French means literally face-to-face, but in English the meaning has shrunk to only mean now something like ‘with regard to’…  I spent some time looking for a phrase or some such that spoke of the surface of things as these characters are all surface and have nothing underneath, but then I was reminded of this expression and I rather like it. Any suggestions welcome, though if you have a better idea!

masquerade sketch (detail 3)

the girl whose mask is slipping, revealing… nothing at all

There are even cats in it. Oh dear… furry things I love cats, but I hate to paint fur – it masks the structure of everything, and it’s so… vague… Still, I couldn’t resist cats with masks on

masquerade sketch (detail 4)

the cats, of course, are innocent bystanders and up to nothing at all

…so that’s the start. There’s quite a lot of meticulous tracing-out and drawing again to go now. After that, I will probably be gilding the background too, before any actual painting happens…

I can make you look like a fairy!

Tags

art, commission, fairy, painting, portrait

Here’s the painting I recently completed. This is Sherrie-jane – she sells lingerie in Somerset, including specialist bra-fitting, her business is called ‘Orchid’ – http://www.orchidlangport.co.uk/ – and she likes champagne. Quite a lot to get into 4 x 8 inches… but her daughter wanted a special present for her, for the re-launch of her new business, so in went the bras and the orchids and it all came together with quite a nice oriental feel, which was something of a happy accident.

Sherrie-jane: portrait of a Lingerie Fairy

People do occasionally ask me ‘do you do commissions?’, and I say yes… occasionally… but I don’t usually get asked unless people want to be made to look like a fairy or a demon! Here is a painting I did some years ago, of a girl called Stacey, for instance:

Stacey

The worrying bit is when I paint a portrait of someone I don’t know, from a photograph, and I wonder if it really looks like them, but I am told likenesses have been really close.

My most startling result in that respect was a portrait I did last summer, of somebody’s personal ghost! Apparently I got her spot on… in fact the gentleman in question is firmly of the opinion that I was temporarily taken over by said ghost, though I have my own views on this matter… I would love to be able to include it in this post, but it’s destined for a book cover of the story of this ghost, and so I can’t show it to you yet.

Instead I’ll leave you with this one – another slightly nerve-wracking issue is whether people will like their surprise presents! Below is a portrait of the Duke family, commissioned by Mr Duke, as a present for his wife. I am assured that she loved it, so perhaps I caught their hidden qualities!

The Dukes of Hell

 

How to grow Greetings Cards from Seed…

Tags

art, beans, greetings cards, printing, runner beans

Ok, so I lied a little bit in the title, the seeds are in fact runner bean seeds, but there are seeds in there and they are indeed planted inside greetings cards:

Greetings Cards by Nancy Farmer!

And here is how I come to be planting runner beans inside my greetings cards:

It can be hard to sell original artwork because the cost of the final item can be prohibitive to some who’d like to be customers. I find this especially so because my pictures are very detailed and I am so very slow and fussy… And it is so very easy to get artwork printed onto things at a low cost if you are getting lots done at once. And people are very keen on saying “oh you should have greetings cards… a book… calendars… mugs… tea towels…” and so on and so fourth.

On the whole, nowadays, I smile politely and say that sounds very interesting, I will think about it, thank you. But occasionally I tell people about the twenty thousand greetings cards I have in the wardrobe. Strictly speaking there are not twenty thousand anymore, but there were…

Way back some years ago when I hadn’t been painting long, I used to run off a few cards on my printer at home, They were nice little things, printed on a mould-made deckle-edged paper like watercolour paper, and I sold them locally to a few shops. They were spotted by a fellow who phoned me up and wanted to be my rep and sell them all over Cornwall and Devon. He was very enthusiastic. But I couldn’t get the price down low enough to pay the commission of a rep selling them and so I looked into the costs of getting cards printed up using offset-litho (what I still think of as ‘proper grown-up commercial printing’, though digital printing has got a lot cheaper since then).

Well yes, if you get 1000 of each design the unit cost is really small, and like I say this fellow was really keen to go round all the shops and sell them, so I picked 20 designs, and wrote out a rather big cheque.

Soooo… nowadays I’m a little more suspicious and circumspect. The rep whined about the size of the cards, wanted coloured envelopes suddenly, and free card racks to give to shops, cost me a lot of time and effort in trying to meet his expectations and in the end got bored after about 5 shops, turned out to have less free time than he expected, and finally it was a relief to tell him that if he was going to be this useful I’d rather do without his efforts!

I made some attempt to sell the cards myself, but of course being a rep is a whole other job and there’s only one of me to go round. And maybe I could have looked for another rep, but I began to suspect it’s a trap, because they would want more designs and new stuff on a regular basis and sooner or later I would become more administrator than artist.

I sell the cards now bundled into packs of 20 at exhibitions, and I give them away, and at the rate I am going I will probably shift the lot in another 25 years or so. I have long ago learned not to waste further time worrying about the problem. And lately some of the surplus and less popular designs fell into the compost bin, too.

But the important thing is I am getting better at not getting seduced into paying people to make me more stuff that I have to then go and sell. I still have lots of little stuff for people to buy – I recycle my failed etching prints into handmade cards, I have handmade baubles and coasters will little original drawings in them, and I even get calendars printed up now, just not very many at once. But it is worth noting that other people can be very enthusiastic about telling you you could get this and that made up and that such things would definitely sell (while generally not in fact buying anything themselves). I just remember to be polite, thank them kindly, and recall that I still have enough cards to paper the village with…

So, these thoughts occurred to me as I planted up my runner beans this morning, and so I though I would share this story on the blog, because occasionally I do get artists asking me if I think it’s worth their going down a similar road.

And if you’re wondering how on earth I though it would be a good idea to plant beans this way in the first place, well, my sister-in-law has planted hers in toilet rolls (beans have roots that tend to grow straight down, not out, and they do not like their roots disturbed when planted out in the ground, so this way you plant the whole thing, rather than taking them out of a pot) and, well I just didn’t have enough toilet rolls, but if this works I have plenty more cards even for next year’s beans

I shall of course post a photo when the beans come up!

Do flower fairies eat flowers?

Tags

art, fairies, flower fairies, ideas

According to the site stats, somebody found this blog today by googling “do flower fairies eat flowers?”. I am sorry to say they would not have received an answer from this blog, for it is indeed an excellent question, so much so that I feel it ought to be addressed! If they do eat flowers, of course, this leads me to wonder do they eat the flowers of their chosen plants? Because this might be a very serious problem for my poison flower fairies.

A scan through more of the obscure search terms people have used to find this blog reveals some other interesting thoughts, of which the strangest is probably “flowers coming out of Medusa’s head”… now that would be very odd. Snakes, of course, perfectly normal, but flowers?! It puts me in mind of the idea of snakes in long grass, but I can’t quite get that one to work in my mind….

A couple of other people have been looking for “weaponized flower-fairy” and “kinky latex wedding ideas”, both searches I can see would have let to my paintings on the poison flower fairies as well, but again, sadly, their searches would have proved fruitless. I cannot please everyone!

However, I am now wondering what it is that fairies do indeed eat? It puts me in mind of an as-yet-un-painted idea I had concerning aphids, and that they could in fact be nasty little fat sucking fairies with big sharp teeth! (can you tell, I’m also a gardener?!).

I have frequently drawn fairies with glasses of wine in their hands, but seldom food… any suggestions, anyone?

Here is one thought – a drawing I did many years ago of fairy thievery that I called ‘The Honey Thieves’. I strongly suspect that whatever it is that fairies eat, they are, sadly, apt more to steal it than to work hard to produce it themselves…

The Honey Thieves

Finished painting: Ricinus Communis, the Fairy of the Castor Bean Plant

Tags

art, castor bean plant, castor oil plant, fairies, fantasy, finished artwork, gouache, nancy farmer, painting, poison flower fairies, ricin, ricinus communis

The Fairy’s name is Ricina, of course, being a girl fairy… but for the sake of botanical accuracy and Google the title remains as the masculine form of the name. She holds an umbrella in memory of the time she got caught poisoning someone, and, weaponized umbrellas being something more suited to the Avengers than to real life, I have given her John Steed’s bowler hat. She is deadly, but, more sinned-against than sinning, she is rarely the actual culprit, though frequently the suspect… either that, or she has got a lot cleverer and isn’t going to get caught again!
So, here is Ricina:

Ricina, Fairy of the Castor Bean Plant

And the whole painting:

Ricinus Communis, the Castor Bean Plant, with Fairy

Apologies that I didn’t continue with the step-by-step photos, but there was little dramatic change after the last photo, and the delay was more whilst I went on holiday than that there was another full week’s painting. Here are the previous posts that show this painting as it develops:
Sketch and photos, and a little of the story of this plant…
Start of the painting…
Adding colour to the painting…
And the final stage before the finished painting…

And some more close-up pictures for you:

Ricina, portrait shot

Buds, and all that passes for flowers on Ricinus Communis (the white sprays - the red bits are the seed pods forming)

And the wonderful, bright red spiky seed pods!

I have one more Poison Flower Fairy lined up as a sketch, though the actual painting of that one may have to wait: I need something half-way-through to demonstrate on Thursday 31st May at the Royal Bath & West Show: I have been very kindly asked onto Somerset Life’s stand, and that painting may very well be a useful candidate for the spot. Follow this blog for more details when I have them…

Win a fairy in a good cause!

Tags

brainstrust, clare gladding, fairy sculpture, fairytasia, just giving, raffle

Clare Gladding is probably my oldest friend of those I’ve never met. She’s one of those people who I came across somewhere on the internet, back in the old days when one could actually sell art work on Ebay, and Etsy did not exist, neither did WordPress!

She is running a raffle in aid of Brainstrust, who have helped her so much lately, so if you fancy winning this gorgeous handmade one-of-a-kind fairy, visit her Just Giving page: http://www.justgiving.com/Fairytasia. Please note: the Fairy is her creation – not mine! …of course it is because of the fairy theme in both our artwork that we first met. If you’d like to see more of her artwork, have a look at her website: http://www.fairytasia.co.uk/

Win 'Alexi' by Clare Gladding of Fairytasia

Alexi is a one of a kind creation, hand-sculpted from polymer clay

No painting and not even a sketchbook…

Tags

cumbria, holiday

I am on holiday in Cumbria . Just thought I’d post a couple of snaps to show why I’m not painting this week, especially having spent a good half hour or so wrestling with the GIMP in an attempt to enhance the photo below. I am not a Photoshop expert,  in fact I have never used it. Instead, I have the GIMP, and what it lacks in intuitive operation, it makes up for in being completely free.

So, having fiddled around, the photo now looks more like it really looked, with the rain sweeping in across the hills. Yes, it probably looks everso slightly buggered-about-with too, but I don’t care – I am on holiday and this is not work. This was Sunday, from near the top of the Crinkle Crags, looking southish towards Harter Fell, which is, I think, the pointy one in the centre distance.

From Crinkle Crags towards Harter Fell

Here’s the original photo – as you can see the colouring was already quite odd:

original image

And a snap taken yesterday, on the way to Scafell (which is out of the photo a bit to the left). I’m not in the photo because I was behind the camera…

on the way to ScaFell

Today I am resting the knees…

Some people might say that I should take a sketchbook, but I have mostly learned to stop worrying about that, and stopped carrying a book of blank pages around in the hope that it’s a habit I might acquire. I just do not do outdoor sketching, or much sketching at all other than life drawing and to work out the compositions for my paintings. Possibly this is because I am not a fully-rounded artist, but instead a cross between an artist and a nerd with a side-interest in science…  most of my subjects do not originate from things I see, but from concepts that I find interesting, like poisonous plants for instance, and stories and mismatched concepts and the like. Besides, there are mountains to be walked up this week!

 

 

More on Ricinus Communis, the Fairy of the Castor Bean Plant

Tags

art, castor bean plant, castor oil plant, fairies, fantasy, gouache, how-to, poison flower fairies, ricinus communis, work-in-progress

I will have to put this painting aside for a week, and so this is just a quick post to show you as far as I got yesterday…

Here was the painting straight after its hosing down in the shower:

Painting after washing with water

At this point, a painting always looks a bit harsh, so I have tended to go over part of it with several colour washes with very translucent paints (some of the watercolours can be better than gouache for this, but the opacity of any paint varies from pigment to pigment and some of the gouache paints also work).

The way I usually do this is to brush over the entire surface of the painting with water, then add a bit of watery colour in one or more places, let it spread as much as I want it to, and dry it rapidly with a hair dryer. After quite a lot of time I build up colour where I want it – often around the edges as this process tends to deaden the detail, depending on what colour I am using. If I am quick, I can brush colour over a large area and mop up the colour off patches where I don’t want it, like on a central figure, while drying with a hair dryer at the same time. This is not precise but usually that is a nice thing since my paintings suffer sometimes from too many hard edges.

And here it is now:

Painting after numerous colour washes

The colour washes tend to pull it all together, though I have lost even more of my detail now! Next I shall probably be adding more of that thin blue I used for the under painting, before I take off more paint again… but that will have to wait a week.

Adding colour: Ricinus Communis Fairy continued…

Tags

art, castor oil plant, fairies, fantasy, gouache, nancy farmer, poison flower fairies, ricinus communis, work-in-progress

So after the blue under-painting: http://nancyfarmer.wordpress.com/2012/04/18/start-of-a-painting-ricinus-communis-the-fairy-of-the-castor-oil-plant/ I can now begin adding colour to this painting.

Adding colour to the Ricin Fairy painting

The colour is added on in thick gouache paint, the idea being ultimately to stain the paper, so the particular pigments are carefully chosen. All the same, I suspect something of a mistake in the colour of the lower leaves. The trouble is I don’t want them too dark, and with this technique that means adding white at this stage, and the dark green has gone kind of blue (though not, I think, quite as blue as in the photo). I will probably get away with it in the end, but the colour was hard to judge here: the leaves are rather shiny, so the lower ones reflect the lightness of the sky in the photos that I took, whereas my paintings don’t really take much account of lighting and reflection in the end, so I am seduced by the colour I see in the photo… on top of that, the real colour of the leaves is a kind of dark red over dark green, which is a little hard to pin down in any case. Going with the pale blue anyway as I am stuck with it for the moment…

This is the stage where it looks like I don’t know what I’m doing!

Ricin Fairy: filling in the colour.

And then I take the painting upstairs and give it a hosing down in the shower:

Painting after 'washing'

This is what I meant by staining the paper – I have washed most of the paint off again… and now my under-painting shows through again.

As is always the way, some of the meticulous effort I’ve put into the first painting and drawing stages will be lost and the effort has been for nothing. Almost. If there weren’t shades and half-seen details it would be a less interesting painting, but all the same, I look at the painting at this stage and I know there was detail there before!