Author: victoriaclare

Lurcher in Frost, Harehound in the Woods

My saluki x Rosie Roo on a frosty Christmas day morning.  Above is version 2, where I have adjusted her face a little, made some small lighting amends, and taken a new photograph.  It’s surprising the difference that makes.

My original idea of a dog glowing with the winter light behind her, which I think looks perhaps a little flat by comparison (and definitely has the wrong eyes!)

And here is a smaller A4 painting of my Greek Harehound pup, Theo.  He’s seven months old and surprisingly chill: he likes to watch the world going past as well as haring around like a loon.   I didn’t like the background of the photo this was taken from, so I’ve added a woodland scene.

Cirdan Facing the Storm

Here is Tolkien’s Cirdan the Shipwright, looking out across a wild sea into the uttermost West. Cirdan was eager to travel to Valinor; when the Teleri went without him, he wanted to sail after them, but was told to wait. He built ships for other people till the last ship sailed from Mithlond.

I made this acrylic painting after watching a demonstration by Emma Carter Bromfield at a Tavistock Group of Artists meeting this week.

A Good Many Roleplaying Character Portraits

I’ve been playing in a roleplaying campaign for five years now, run by my husband, and set in the world of Second Age Middle-earth.  One great thing about roleplaying is that you meet lots of fascinating characters and get ideas for all kinds of exciting scenes.  Some of these were painted in advance, but most of them were made pretty quickly during the actual campaign time, with the players giving their own ideas of what the characters should look like.

These are almost all A4 paintings, watercolour inktense pencil on watercolour paper, though the two bottom right are larger and were painted in acrylic on artcard.

Paintings from the Great Glen

I had a holiday in Scotland, exploring the Caledonian Canal!  We had some marvellous misty weather and sunshine slanting through the clouds.  This was a view from one end of Loch Lochy.

But later on the sun came out.  I painted this after an early-morning walk where the first sun was shining on the harebells and the cobwebs.

Sun on the water. I painted this from a photo that I took rather than from life, and I’m quite pleased with it.  I love sparkles, and the very dark cold water of the lochs makes for marvellous sparkly waves.


A sighting of a Famous Resident of Loch Ness, plus a paddle-boarder and a ferry.  I painted this from life.  (Well. nearly 😀 )

Story Illustrations in acrylic and ink

 

Maglor from the Silmarillion meets Ilbereth, Father Christmas’s secretary from Tolkien’s Father Christmas Letters. Created for the Tolkien Reverse Summer Bang 2019 event, this work inspired this fabulous story by Narya-flame. This one is acrylic

And here’s a second illustration of Maglor on Magdalen Bridge – this time in ink with inktense pencil colour.

I made a brief video of the last painting by photographing it as I went along!

 

Snip the Cycle

I made this for the Give A Dog a Home Art Event. They sent me an anonymous profile of two of their fosterers who have adopted street dogs as pets, and I made art of it.

My idea was to suggest not just the joy that adopting a street dog and giving him a home can bring, but also the importance of spay and neuter programs to prevent there being too many puppies to find homes for.

Some little ink and brusho Silmarillion-inspired paintings

Here are some ink and Brusho paintings of Silmarillion characters that I made for Nolofinwean Week on Tumblr.  These are quite small paintings on A5 watercolour paper, so not quite as detailed as my larger acrylic paintings.

Aredhel riding fearless through the dark forest of Nan Dungortheb:

Fingon fighting off a rather goofy-looking Glaurung (a wingless dragon, of course):

Love Across the Ice:
Turgon & his wife Elenwe, who died crossing the Grinding Ice:

Survivors in the War of Wrath:
In the Halls of Mandos as the War of Wrath raged across Beleriand, Fingolfin Fingon, Angrod, Aegnor and Aredhel found this tapestry: Fingolfin’s wife Anaire in battle beside their cousin Galadriel. Now they can’t decide whether to cheer or bite their imaginary spirit-nails. There were not so many Noldor who survived Beleriand, and yet they sent a host to the War of Wrath: I believe that host was largely made up of the women who did not follow Feanor and Fingolfin.

Eärendil’s Star:
Elros’s father, guiding Elros’s ship, with an Eagle figurehead, towards the Land of Gift, Numenor.

Dry pigments and inks

I spent some time experimenting with dry Brusho watercolour pigment powder,  ink pencils, and spray inks.  The picture above was I think the most successful, but I thought I’d upload some of the other works to record how I approached them.

The painting with the deer, above,  I started with light. I used a spray bottle of yellow ink to make a spot of yellow in the middle of my picture that faded to white all around, and then a very small spray of red ink around it to create a slight darkening/reddening around the edges.  Once that was completely dry (vital so the ink would not run!  Ink stays put once it’s dry (mostly) whereas watercolour can be re-wetted and will run and move more.)

I painted the top of the image with plain water, and added Leaf Green brusho pigment to the top of the wet area.  Then I sprinked Moss Green and Sandstone pigment at the bottom of the wet area, stood the picture up vertically, and dripped water here and there so that the wet pigment ran in mingled streaks down across the dry yellow ink sunburst.

The painting below was created in the same way, but without the ink sunburst: this was my earlier draft.  It’s still quite a pleasing thin forest, I think.

I love the way the Brusho pigment makes random patterns and speckles of light when applied to wet watercolour paper.  (You do need a thick good quality watercolour paper for this kind of thing, so the paper doesn’t crinkle.)

I brushed the pigment across the bottom with a wet brush, just to create a foreground, and added a little more moss green foliage at the bottom.

Then, once the trees and grass were dry, the last step was to draw a deer.  I used a purple Inktense pencil for that, and then carefully washed over it with water.  This allowed some of the yellow ink to show through the purple layer, and re-wetting the Brusho trunks underneath the deer gave the purple a good varied colour so it sat well with the rest of the picture rather than looking stuck on.

I tried the same idea here, but without the yellow ink undercoat and with a figure instead of the deer, but it didn’t work quite so well.

Before I started playing with the idea of drips forming trees, I first tried them creating the under-water stems of water-lilies.  I think this would have worked a little better if I had given the lilies a bit more space and drawn them out more carefully. This was my first attempt at putting the Brusho colours onto wet watercolour paper, and then tilting the paper to make the pigments combine.  It’s 100% abstract, but I rather like it.  That’s how  I ended up  with the idea for the lilies.

And finally (this post is all the wrong way around) this is the first picture I made in this session. I drew the dog first, using Inktense pencils, then I masked over her with a liquid rubber mask.  Then once the mask was dry, I water-painted the whole thing and started applying a mix of dry brusho powder to see what would happen.  What happened was quite colourful!

 

 

 

 

Tavistock Abbey Copper Beech

I made this little sketch sitting outside in the sun today, at Cafe Liaison in Tavistock, looking out across the churchyard to the remains of the old Abbey building.  This huge beech with its wide shady branches usually has children playing or people sitting around it, so I tried to record a few of them, though it’s hard work painting figures direct from life when they are all moving about and have no idea someone is scribbling away trying to catch their movement.

Lord of the Sea

Ulmo, Lord of the Sea, playing one of his great horns.   I painted this very fast – it is A3, but I completed it in about 3 hours, and I was trying for a free style with lots of movement.   Of course it looks better in real life than in the photo, but I’m still quite pleased with this one at the moment.

Paintings from a visit to Essex

I was visiting Maldon last week, where my mother grew up. Living in Cornwall, I’m not used to a flat landscape full of wide fields of wheat and barley, and I was delighted to see corn poppies, too, growing among the barley. So I had to paint them.

I also liked the tall forms of oats – presumably left behind by a previous crop – that had popped up here and there among the barley. I painted this one very quickly, sitting in the sun, using inktense watercolour pencils:

In Maldon, I visited the famous causeway across the River Blackwater where the battle of Maldon is thought to have taken place, more than a thousand years ago, and here it is!

Painting on Perspex

This is something of an experiment. I had a big frame where the back panel had got damaged, but the frame & perspex were fine, so I tried some peelable glass paint and made this design on the perspex. I like the way it changes with the background and the light! You can see it looks quite different in this second picture:

Subject is, of course, my beloved saluki lurcher Rosie, from Lurcherlink rescue. Because painting on a transparent sheet where light comes through the paint itself is pretty demanding in terms of how the brushstrokes look, I drafted this out in advance using coloured pencils.

Finally: this is the window that I originally bought the glass paint for!

Because it’s peelable, I can just take it off and replace with something else if I get bored of it.