The stages of a piece of my art.
Like some friends online and locally I sometimes record the stages of a piece of work to remind me how it developed as a piece. I did this most notably on Facebook for my piece of the Swanage rowing regatta last June and it led to a sale before I had even finished the work. This post is not about triggering a sale but also allows me to think about how my work is developing.
So, one of my stated aims for this year is to develop a collection of pieces of Corfe Castle, the village as well as the large piece on the mound.
As the winter is not always the best time to hang around I took a series of photos around the village in November which I am now using to develop new art.
Artistic license, you will see, allows me to select the pieces I want from the photo and change other aspects.
My first job is to create the base drawing. I don’t use pencil as I have said before but fineliner pigment pens of a variety of nib widths.
The castle is becoming a favourite to experiment with shadows from different angles that I have seen while looking at it. This time the foreground was to be the hedge at the edge of the GPs and Purbeck Council Office car park. I could colour a hedge as a single block of colour or as I am tending to do increasingly I can produce a more detailed piece. My representation of trees, bushes and so on have changed so much in the past year. So a time consuming task of drawing all those leaves and hedge gaps.
So to colour this with my Promarkers I use a dabbing technique that has become familiar at the art group I attend using acrylic paint or inking collagraph and printing plates. The dabs do not always match the leaf outlines but he sense of a looser structure works well. The shadow at the bottom starts as cross hatching and then colour overlaid. I try a variety of shades on a palette sheet before I commit to the picture.
Next I decided to have a bright sky. The cloud shapes are put in”Simpson style”. This time I have experimented with colouring in parts of the cloud as they are often not solid entities. I am pleased how this has turned out.
The grass of the banks around the castle and East Hill are kept much simpler.
Finally, it’s the castle walls and shadows using a variety of greys to match some of the pen and ink cross hatching on the original drawing stage.
This piece has been finished faster than the view from a side road to the east of the castle where the vegetation aspect has taken more consideration.
Yesterday windy weather and rain changed plans so a visit to James at Art2Card, to order prints and cards to be made up. So my new Corfe Castle collection develops in addition to some mini canvases previously sold, my first linocut print 
and a pen and ink original also at the printers for card design.