Monthly Archives: August 2019

Ocean

Posted on by under Artwork

I’ve always struggled with painting landscape. But here are some things that make it easier:

  1. Work in layers. I literally took a blue pen and very roughly sketched out the painting. Then I took acrylics and used them with a lot of water to make an underpainting – at this point you don’t have to be careful, just put down colour where it’s supposed to be. And then I added oils, which is where I could actually start blending things, and get the exact shades, details and depth. The first steps are easy, because there’s no pressure when you know you’re gonna paint over it anyway. And the last step is easy, because you have the guide of the paint you’ve already applied.
  2. Choose a reference photo with a lot of contrast. This might be personal preference, but I can’t deal with painting full meadows with a thousand different colours in them. I might just need to learn the right techniques, but for now it’s easier to paint something with contrast. That means the dark parts are just dark, and there are big blocks of basically just one colour. That makes it a bit easier to grasp for me, and when a picture has clear shapes it’s easier to know where to begin.
  3. I actually only have two points, but it just looks better with a third.

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Etsy

To see the past through a bedroom window

Posted on by under poetry

The top of the trees
young and green
swaying in front of a bright blue background

We can’t walk back along our timline
but we can
oh we can

Have you never wandered the road where you learned how to bike?
Touched the doorframe you used to grab while swinging around fastly
chasing a friend
a cake
a birthday surprise

Your timeline is written in footsteps,
through mud and concrete.

Bruised knees
and bleeding hands
the stretch of grass

Not your memories
but your actual line of time.

It’s tangled
red
all up in the trees
all around the garden

My mum hung these blue curtains,
and I sit on the mattress.

There’s a weight like a rock at the bottom of my heart.

I am not visiting.
The trees, this window:
they’re seemingly permanent.
It seems I can’t get away

but if there’s purpose I dropped along these roads I can’t remember it
I think: I have so much more of that in the future,
why am I still sitting here,
all tangled up in red.

(Etsy)

Posted on by under Artwork

(Continuing from my last post, I’ve been sharing a lot of my art on etsy lately. Mainly pretty small things, because then they don’t have to be that expensive but it can still be an original piece. I want to write some sort of essay about that – on the merits of original art, simply because I believe there is power and beauty in that kind of shared creativity. I don’t know exactly why or how though, so I want to figure it out for myself to tell it better to others. Anyway, here’s a link.)

Etsy

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