How to apply gold leaf to paper – part 1

I took some step-by-step photos of this ‘gold fairy’ as I did her. Couldn’t say I’m an expert gilder, but I have had a bit of practice by now and I’ve learnt one or two things, so I thought I’d write a little explanation for anyone interested. Here (below) is the outline drawing. The circle is to be entirely gilded. To gild on paper you need to stick the gold on with something. ‘Gold size’ is what the proper glue is called that the gold leaf is stuck on with, but the actual sort of gold size you use depends…

A sudden swarm of Gold Fairies

Printmaking has ceased until October, and in theory this gives me the summer to concentrate on painting and drawing. Time, however, keeps running away from me! Here are six gold fairies though, which I hope will make enticing little pictures for visitors to Somerset Arts Weeks (or just passing people, in need of a picture!). It’s been some years since I drew the last Gold Fairy, and they have always been popular. I love drawing the human form (even if I have to make it up – I just can’t seem to get the models to hover in mid air…

The Other Boxing Day Hunt…

More from 12 views of Glastonbury Tor I have been getting along faster with the calendar than I have with this blog: here is the corner of my newly-designed studio/gallery – now equipped with with hanging rails, but as you see still lacking the odd cable clip or two. I am three quarters of the way there with printing the pictures! The print below is number 6 to appear on this blog – if I show you all of them together what will I have to say in the next few days? This is probably my December picture – ‘The…

The Blackberry Harvest

From 12 Views of (Glastonbury) Tor… Another print for the 2015 calendar is done – this one was printed from the plate I featured in my post on ‘imaginary drawing’: https://nancyfarmer.wordpress.com/2014/02/07/drypoint-and-imaginary-drawing-more-views-of-the-tor/. That post shows me in the middle of creating the image on the aluminium plate, with sandpaper, burnisher and pointy tool. All that guesswork… but I am quite pleased with how this one came out now. Sandpaper is my new favourite thing, which is odd because having been a jeweller I used it for days on end and never discovered a liking for it before! Here is the Blackberry…

Drypoint and imaginary drawing… (more Views of the Tor)

I am in the process of creating the plate for another print for my 2015 calendar, “12 Views of the Tor”. This is another one that I have decided to complete entirely in drypoint, so I thought I would take a break and show you some of the fun problems with drypoint… First the sketch: Harvest time, but the blackberries are proving hard to steal… the hapless fairy looks like she will loose her stocking, if not her dress and half her haul! When I roughly shaded the Tor and its tower in dark behind the main subject it was…

Urtica Dioica, Stinging Nettle Fairies – Finished!

The painting of the Stinging Nettle Fairies is finished! Decided in the end not to add any other colours than green, sometimes the trick is knowing where to stop! So this painting is entirely in Prussian Blue (see my post about the blue underpainting for the general idea, and the previous post to this one for early photos of this actual painting), followed by a complete pasting-over with a wash of green (mostly Cobalt Green Light, with a little Indian Yellow mixed in). After that, highlights happened simply by a careful removal of some of the green layer with brushes…

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…

Finally February arrives…

The final piece of my 2013 calendar is complete!  Not without slight mishap, I might add. I might have called this post ‘try to make each mistake only once’! First of all here is the drawing: I thought I would give it the same gold-and-silhouette treatment as the September one, partly because two drawings amongst a sea of paintings seemed better than one lonely one on its own, and partly because the drawing for March (coming after this one, as you would expect), has very pale figures with a dark background, so I thought it would be a nice contrast….

The Mad September Moon Dance!

The September picture is finished… again! This one is much better 🙂 though it seems I do have a slight difficulty with silhouettes. I am still uneasy about this one, but I like quite a lot of it: I think the gold leaf moon is both a good thing and a bad thing! I like the shininess of it, but does it conflict with the purity of the monochrome silhouette? It is going to give me trouble in any case, because on the scanner it will probably appear a little flat and brown, so I’m going to see if I…

Finished Painting: Escher’s Crackers

The painting hasn’t changed much I know, but I have done another almost two days work on it so for the sake of completeness I thought I’d show it to you again: Most of the difference between this one and the last photo is the ‘un-painting’ I have been doing. What you saw in the last photo was how the painting looked having been hosed down with the shower thingy, but brushed only with a very soft brush to wash the loose paint off. After that I dried the painting and worked up some of the details by wetting and…