One Creative Thing » painting

Went to a free concert

minim — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 19:31:15 +0000

at the King’s Place Festival – what a great event! Cheap, plentiful, good quality music, with plenty of places to slob about and catch up with friends and listen to free performances. I’ll definitely try to take more advantage of it if they do one again next year. Met up with a friend and chatted for hours. Saw the current exhibition at the gallery too.

Messed about with designs for other pages

minim — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 22:12:28 +0000

Getting the hang of doing graduated washes with watercolour in my Moleskine at last – the first couple turned out pretty spotty, but it’s looking a bit better now. Working on the designs is really getting ideas flowing about what we can do and how things can be accomplished. Exciting!

Played around with homepage design for the super-secret project

minim — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 16:04:40 +0000

Yes, it’s a web project. But then that would hardly surprise most people we know, I suspect. Design for this is entailing messing about with pens and watercolour and out of date masking fluid, which was rather nasty. Definitely needs replacing

used my watercolour pencils…

minim — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 18:44:48 +0000

to liven up the rubbish drawing i did when in france. it didn’t work very well so you’re not going to see it, but hey, it’s the effort that counts, eh?

Another art day

minim — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 20:40:21 +0000

Only had the morning really in Brussels before needing to get lunch and go and check-in for my train, so I went to the Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium, which was absolutely fantastic and huuuge and worth a good deal more than the measly €5 they charge to get in. Had a last wander round the Grand Place with my lunch when I was done, then bought specaloos and some PIMs for John from the supermarché near the hostel before collecting my bag and heading to the station.

Knitted on the Eurostar on the way home and a French lady opposite told me my scarf was “très jolie” and that she’d always wanted to learn how to knit, so I told her it wasn’t very hard – only 2 types of stitches to be learnt. Nice to have a good exchange in French, however small.

Had an art extravaganza day

minim — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 23:35:40 +0000

Went to S.M.A.K. (contemporary art gallery) and then the normal art gallery in Ghent. I wasn’t that taken with anything much in S.M.A.K. but it was marvellous to see a gallery devoted entirely to the work of living artists, and there was a very nice wonky stool made by some Italian chap which I rather liked. The other art gallery was fabulous, especially the modern section – mostly Belgian artists I’d never heard of, but some beautiful pieces there.

Had frites for lunch, then boarded a train back to Brussels and went and wandered around the Grand Place for a bit, visited the Manneken Pis to see what he was wearing (nothing at all, but apparently earlier in the month he’d been dressed as a dentist) and then went and indulged in a hearty and not too expensive spaghetti bolognaise for dinner. Yum! More knitting when I got back to the youth hostel.

Learnt a bit more about watercolour technique

minim — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 23:13:00 +0000

I’ve started reading a book called The encyclopaedia of watercolour landscape techniques. There’s some really interesting stuff in there and I’ve already started playing with wet-in-wet and spattering techniques.

Finished Copenhagen watercolours

minim — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 21:41:00 +0000

In Switzerland. I did a couple of watercolours in my Moleskine watercolour notebook when we were in Copenhagen but didn’t quite get the time to finish them, so polished them off in the morning. Good to have them settled, even if they’re nowhere near Great Art. I just don’t like unfinished stuff. It unsettles me.

Ordered new stuff from Amazon

minim — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 15:19:00 +0000

I seem to be on a bit of a spending spree which I have worked out is largely because I miss my stuff in Australia. Anyway, I cut back on the things I wanted to buy (huuuge list) to order Nigella Express, Nigella Lawson’s latest book which is all about fast food, Step-by-step art school: Watercolour which I’ve had borrowed from Pitshanger Library since before Christmas and is excellent, so for £6-odd I figured I might as well own it rather than accumulating that much in library fines when I forget to renew, and Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms which I’ve never thought much about until it somehow became lodged in my brain a few weeks ago and now I must have it. Hmm. Odd.

Messed about with watercolour

minim — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 15:12:00 +0000

On the new page for this week’s listening in my composition journal. Might do some collage on top of it.