dancing feet!

 Liking doing the feet and looking forward to playing with 'skirt-swish' (of course that's a word)

next dancers

dancing feet next . . .

more dancing

Finished this one

And just got the bottom part of the black and white skirt to go on this one . . .

It's a very different rhythm (see what I did there) to painting camel portraits, much slower and more deliberate in some ways, bigger colour palette of course so I realise what a messy painter I become when I'm only working with one chromatic range as I do with camels, wiping rather than cleaning brushes between colours and mixing colour on the canvas rather than on the palette . . . so all good with camels:  a bit of ochre yellow in the burnt sienna doesn't go any harm.  But dancers in brightly coloured skirts: blue in the yellow, however . . .

first of the new dancers

Not finished yet but enjoying the process.  Need to make the girl a little less annoyed looking :)(

4 more: bit of a theme happening

Two finished today, and all started on the weekend.  Gotta love annual leave.

the last two littlies

  A complete little series.  Happy with these.

Been a while

Happy to be back painting.  Working on small pieces at present.  More to come from this series.

matting and dancers

 So labelled, matted, board backed and cello bagged the 5 limited ed prints . . .  I was definitely in the mood for technical attention to detail mindlessness (yup kind of get the paradox) on the first day after work.  Stuck the print the matt and the backing board in a way that, I hope, is reversable, so we'll see!

 And then onto painting, getting the colour down on the other 3 of the 4 'dancers' series

 And then, just because I couldn't not, working on making one of the Pyndan camels more camelly.l

painting and matt cutting

Strange bedfellows indeed.  Messy, playing and pausing on the dancers beginning

then careful (trying to be as it's a pain when I lose concentration and stuff up on a measurement or cut) with the matt board cutting for the prints . . . and yes, lights on so a bit of a late one.

printing marathon

Ok so this is a painting beginning (more to come as I'm playing with four 'dancers' pieces)

 But here is the marathon.  36 degrees in the studio and no fan as the light Hosho paper in small pieces was struggling enought not to fly away or roll back up with the light weights I was using.
So, I needed to do a print run of about 20 per print block . . . and hadn't really calculated how much paper (and paper tearing) and hand printing using the barron (round thing) this would actually entail.  Durh.

 As the paper that works for these quite quite detailed and small prints is quite thin, I need to use tracing paper on the back when I rub so the barron and the back of the print don't end up all inky.

 I realised how many small slightly weighty things I have in the studio as I was casting around to find things to stop the prints from either flying away or curling up (the Hosho light paper I love comes in a roll so is always a bit curly)

Production central!

 And the clean up of the plates (and one extra that I wanted to check mid carve - bottom left)