Arthur in Egypt

This is not the sort of painting you’ve come to expect of me, I know, but here’s a commission I did a couple of months ago. It was as a present for the father of a friend, the father having his 80th birthday party, and having been in Egypt in the armed services a very long time ago.There were shenanigans, and unproven accusations of syphoning off the British Army’s fuel and selling it to the Arabs. It was just before the Suez crisis… perhaps he even caused the Suez crisis, I am hazy on the details! My job was to…

Trust me, I’m an Artist! (The Foxglove Fairy pat 2)

Back to the Foxglove Fairy from the previous post… Here is the blue underpainting finished. At this point the painting looks fine, and you will think I am ok at painting, but after this everything will go a bit strange for a while as I start to add the colour. Trust me: I’m an artist… On go the first layers of colour. In fact you may not notice the very first colour I added, which was white, where the inside of the foxgloves flowers are spotty. Next I filled in the colours of the fairy. …and the purple and greens…

A Poison Flower Fairy: Digitalis Purpurea, the Foxglove

Here’s another one to add to my alternative flower fairies – the highly poisonous Foxglove… When I started with the recent fairies of deadly plants I called them The Poison Flower Fairies, but of course many things medicinal are also highly poisonous in the wrong dosage, and the Foxglove Fairy should be more appropriately named a Medicinal Flower Fairy. It’s too late now… The amazingly useful properties of Foxgloves, or more precisely Digitalin, the mix of toxic molecules extracted from it, was discovered by a certain Dr William Withering (1741 – 1799), and although my fairy does not look anything…

Three Drinking Nudes, printed

Yesterday was a complete marathon of a printing session. With drypoint (see previous post), the ink is held only by the burr raised by scratching the metal, and it is easily damaged and flattened and the prints get progressively paler. I am told the best thing is simply to print all you can in one day, without stopping, to get the most from the plate…. So, 12 prints from each of three plates, which was asking a bit much for one day’s printing, but by the end of the day I had got it down to a fairly fine and…

Drypoint Nudes

With a bit of luck I will print these tomorrow. These are the drypoint plates that I mentioned in the last post, the prints from these are (I hope) destined to become some nice little coasters, featuring drinking nudes. But at this point I have no idea how well my plates are going to print… oh what fun is printing 😉 The photo above shows one of the aluminium plates, and the tip of the pointy tool wot done it. Below you can see better what I am using. This is not designed for this purpose, it’s a leftover from…

Coasting along…

I have only 2 more sessions of etching to go before the summer, and then no printing or etching till October, so I need a quick project. Here are a little series of nudes with drinks, destined to become drypoint prints, which I will then put in coasters, in the manner of the ‘Stain Devil’ coasters which I have more-or-less run out of for the moment: And below – the sketches on the aluminium plates. Of course it now occurs to me, having sketched directly on the plates (because it seemed easier than messing about with tracing paper) that I…