“Sally”

This is Sally, another painting in watercolour, gouache and gold leaf, a celebration of our lovely clear lake at Vobster Quay, where I swim once a week. The source material for this painting was an underwater photograph I took on our first swim of 2017. It was 2nd January. When the lake gets a bit warmer I hope to have a few more subjects not in wetsuits, but for the moment there are a hardcore few of us, though even we have mostly resorted to wearing gloves in these temperatures. The highlights of the water at the top are created…

Sketching Cider Apple Fairies

I have been Drawing Cider Apple Fairies! The sketch is now as complete as it’s going to get, next stage is to get it onto watercolour paper and get the paints out. This was done on a tablet – not as nice to draw on as paper but what it loses in tactile pleasure it more than makes up for in the ability to move and alter different elements of the drawing until they work together. You can’t see much of this process here, but there was a lot of faffing at the start once I had a pose for…

Ditch Dragons and the Westcountry Bestiary

A quick update: I have written and sent the blurb for my solo exibition at Ilminster in July, it is now definitely called ‘A Westcountry Bestiary’. So I need to steam ahead a bit and paint a few more creatures, beasties and denizens of the Westcountry.  This evening I am drawing Ditch Dragons. They are a thing, honest. Medusa is finished, and when I have time to stitch the scans together I shall post her but for the meantime, it’s dragons in the undergrowth…  

The return of Medusa

In case you thought I only did drawings of swimmers nowadays, here is a little work in progress. I have an exhibition booked at Ilminster Arts Centre in July and I need to get on with quite a lot of new work, of the kind of ‘fantasy-satire’ that people expect to see there (and indeed what I expected to exhibit there when I booked it a couple of years ago). The swimming drawings probably will also feature, but I have a working title for the exhibition which is ‘A Westcountry Bestiary‘ and a nice little handful of new paintings along…

Paper Angel no.1

I have been busy these last few days working out a design for a paper angel Christmas cecoration. I have plans to produce a collection of these that can be coloured in and made up by anyone who would like to. They will be for sale as a collection in my Etsy shop presently, but for now I have just the one. If you’d like to know when the collection is ready, email me at mail@nancyfarmer.net and I’ll let you know, or check in my shop in a couple of weeks. The collection will feature slightly subversive angels, and a…

Papaver Somniferum

There are gaping holes in my ‘Poison Flower Fairies‘ painting series. This suspicious selection of characters so far includes some toxic, medicinal and aggressive types of fairies, but I have yet to add two blindingly obvious ones. One of the omissions is Atropa Belladonna, a.k.a Deadly Nightshade, both notorious and medicinal, and this is partly because I don’t know anywhere hereabouts where it grows though it must be somewhere around, and I do like to draw a plant from life even if it’s sometimes hard to track down the fairies. The other one is almost so obvious you wouldn’t believe…

How to grow trees in just a week!

There was no time to show you any progress on this painting untill it was completed. Early last week I got an email from Gale who runs the 303 Gallery in Martock, asking if I had any image that could be used in their promotion of their summer exhibition ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’ (new artwork required in any case, not necessarily fitting the exhibition title, but work inspired by or appropriate to the title always appreciated). As it happened, I had had an idea about this one, but was busy with other stuff and it hadn’t got onto paper. So…

The Knickers, revealed!

The Witches’ Knickers picture is finished! For a few more finished images see this entry in my finished paintings: https://nancyfarmergallery.wordpress.com/2015/05/25/maiden-flight/ . Here is more work-in-progress, carrying on from the photos where I had begun to paint the witches in a blue monochrome (Prussian blue watercolour or gouache – a dark but very transparent colour) I’ve done several paintings entirely in a monochrome (light and dark shades of a single colour) of Prussian blue lately, but for this painting of course I had to have colour – the knickers MUST be in colour or the painting won’t really work as the idea…

The knickers are afoot

Work in progress on the Witches Knickers picture. I took the sketches I already showed you, and arranged them into a pleasing composition. Part of me wanted to go for three witches as the classic ‘maiden, mother and crone’ combination of the very witchy Hecate, but in the end I just liked a crowd better as a composition, so this is Mother, Crone, and three would-be witches, probably on their maiden voyage in several senses. It did occur to me that if I were to compose a picture of only pretty witches it might actually sell, because I am not…

Progress interrupted by Witches Knickers!

Yesterday somebody told me the about “Witches’ Knickers”… a wonderful term for plastic bags caught in teees and bushes. It appears to be Irish in origin, and, living as I do in pretty unspoilt, knickerless rural Somerset, it’s not greatly fitting into my scheme of a “Westcountry Bestiary”. Still, I am not really convinced about my Silver Street drawings of my previous post, and now I am throughly distracted by drawing witches’ knickers… and knickerless witches. I think the idea might fly. The first three drawings also vaguely conform to the very witchy tripple-goddess Hecate as maiden, mother and crone….