I recently finished and delivered a painting done by request for a friend. It was rather fun to play around with textures and feelings in the same painting. It was also rather challenging to take the rather vague set of things she wanted in a painting, and come up with a design. As often happens, the painting in my head when I designed it looked rather different to the final product, but I’m happy with the outcome nevertheless.
Medium: oil on canvas. Size: 457mm x 1219mm.
The original, with my reproduction above it.
The warden of my residence asked me to digitally repair a photo of his that had received considerable damage in the fire of 2007. This was something of a challenge, as parts of the photo (and certain figures in it) were completely unrecogniseable. Nevertheless it was an enjoyable task, especially as it was something that would actually mean something to someone.
The original photo
The final, photoshopped version
I found it interesting, afterwards, to see what I had in fact done. Thanks to layers in photoshop, one can see all the changes that were made, with the exception of a few broad-spectrum things like level-changes:
All the changes that I made
I have been meaning to do more pencil sketches, as it is good practice at observing things properly. The combination of finding some lovely photo’s while scanning old family albums, as well as having two friends use my room as an art studio for two days gave me a good opportunity to do a sketch.
The picture is of my mother in her younger days, and is drawn of a lovely photo. While I didn’t quite capture the emotion and youthfulness of the photo, I’m still quite pleased with the result.
I’ve been busy with this for a while, an finally finished it last week so as te be able to submit it in the SRC’s Kuns en Foto Kompetisie, which is being exhibited at the US Art Gallery (Cnr Bird & Dorp) until the end of the month.
I was at a friend’s wedding recently, and (as one does) bought an inherently uninteresting gift from the gift registry. I decided that if I wasn’t able to give an exciting and intensly personal gift, the least I could do was wrap it nicely. Thanks to an overabundance of both bright orange and “white gold” paper, this is the end result.
A friend asked me to create an image for his web service, Tweekly.fm. It’s basically a mashup between twitter and last.fm, so the request was for a twitter bird with headphones. I tried to make as shiny and web 2.0 an image as possible. Here is the result:
My sister’s wedding took place last weekend at Morgansvlei Country Estate in Tulbagh. It is an absolutely beautiful venue in a surprisingly pretty (and not so far away town). I did a few designs for the wedding, which I thought it now appropriate to post here.
The first, and most important was an ambigram of my sister and her husband’s names (Lirize & Marcel). This was a fairly difficult one to do (it took the better part of a week last June to get it to a satisfactory state), but I think it works very well, especially in the context of a wedding.
The first place where I used it was for the invitations. These were designed as a 3-fold horizontal card. The closed card shows just the ambigram. When this is opened (with the outline of the ambigram cut out so as to emphasise its shape, it reveals a photo of my sister, surrounded by flowers. This then finally opens to reveal the details of the wedding. I am very proud of the card, and like that it has a lot more design than meets the eye. Particularly cutting around the ambigram necessitated designing it to not only work as a rotation, but also to have an outline that is symmetrical around the centre of the page.
The final interesting thing I designed was a fan, to be given to the guests as a program for the day. Since Tulbagh is rather hot, and the ceremony was at 16:00 in a small chapel, the fans proved to be not only elegant but also very functional.
Welkom
So it was a week late to be in February, but I painted this about three weeks ago (it took forever to dry, so I couldn’t photograph it earlier).
It is inspired by a weekend visit in Welkom – we drove up to spend some time with Fritz there. The sky in the Free State is amazing – it just goes on and on forever. Fritz and I watched both a sunset and the following sunrise, both of which were beautiful. You can see two of our photos of the sunset here and here.
The painting itself was surprisingly quick – I only spent about 3 and a half hours painting. It was really enjoyable though, and I am very pleased with the result.
The new year has started, and in keeping with what, for lack of a better word could be calles a New Year’s Resolution, I have made a good start on my intention to paint at least one painting per month.
The first for the year, shown above, was done at my mother’s request. She wanted something to hang in my parents’ bedroom, and had come across a photograph of the Cone Nebula, which served as the inspiration for this painting.
It was interesting to try and create a sense of movement and intensity while painting something that, at least from our little perspective, is rather static. While the subject has less narrative than I like, it was a pleasing exercise in technique and composition.
As I type this there are more canvasses staring at me from across the room. Now to decide what to paint on them…
I’m finally at home and properly settled in after an absolutely amazing month-long holiday in Europe and the UK. It’s been a really inspiring trip, to see so many incredible things and places, and while I don’t know exactly what I’m inspired to do, I certainly want to do something(s).
I was however surprised by how much I missed South Africa – both the people and the place itself. Visiting faraway places makes one much more appreciative of what we have here, and reaffirms how fortunate we are to be able to live in such a beautiful country. I hope I’ll be able to see a bit more of SA this year – after all, petrol’s cheap (or will be after tomorrow), so why not?
I’ll post photos of my trip on flickr over the next few days.
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