Contemporary Painting Studio Week 4

Last week in Contemporary Painting Studio, Amanda Knight  was the tutor in the morning and gave us a fascinating and informative whistlestop tour through  acrylic and oil mediums , particularly for glazing.   Most of the group paint in oils  so that is what she concentrated on  but she gave an interesting  demonstration of the luminosity of using glazes of transparent colour in acrylics  rather than mixing colours ( a bit like watercolour but more so! ) . She  mentioned the work of Mali Morris ( examples above)  who currently has an exhibition at the Fold Gallery -  definately one I hope to see before it closes, her work looks so joyful.  

 There  wasn't much time  left to do much before lunch - I'd made some B&W copies of my collages  and stuck them on a piece of paper and started to work into them with white, already looking interesting  as they are more integrated with the background.  In the afternoon we were choosing preliminary work and sketches  to  go in the display cases on the 3rd floor   so this with some of the original collages  is what went in.

I've got into using up leftover paint on  a sheet of paper, working with a credit card, I've now got quite a stash of  painted papers for backgrounds or to tear up for collage. This time I did an monoprint as well ( above) . I'd  spent my benchtime while at Studio 11 in Eastbourne doing monoprints on fabric ( 65 of them!) so I was still in the ' what if' zone. 

These are a taster of what I produced there  using acrylics and an acetate sheet ( above) and a Gelli plate (below) . I spent my coffee break photocopying some of the  better ones for  use in collage and after talking to Michelle Dow yesterday am going to do some more , varying the scale. 

 In preparation for tomorrow's class  I've been playing with images of some of  the sketches, paintings and collages in Photoshop

This is the top of the painting I did in week 2 ( above)    and with 'invert' filter below. I like how the newspaper text beneath the paint shows through

 Last Friday I  did some printing on fabric  and t-shirt transfer   sheets and today I bondawebbed the fabric ones onto pieces of old linen tablecloth ( I'll stitch into these for Journal Quilts) and conscious that  I've yet to do much painting (!), ironed  photo transfers onto primed  and painted canvas
(I had good success with this technique on Advanced Painting course last year)

 While waiting for the BT telephone engineer ( we've had no incoming calls since Saturday although outgoing and broadband were fine ) , I started to look through some of my art books for examples of collaged work .
The acrylic collage pieces by Anthony Whishaw struck a chord  - his work has often been my favourites at the RA Summer Exhibition ( which is why I requested his monograph as a Xmas present )

And coming full circle in this post, his  painting ' Espot' of transparent acrylic glazes !

UPDATE on 'The Big Draw  Selfie' , the animation has now been posted on the City Lit Blog . My drawing is  the glasses towards the end !