Sketchbook Landscapes

Inspired by Minnie Small on Youtube I've been doing some small landscape paintings based on images from Google maps street view.
Have you ever just looked around on Google maps? Dropped the little man on a random spot in a random country and had a walk around. It's fascinating!

The paintings are done with gouache and are quite quick to do. I can get one or two done in an evening which is great for keeping my hand in the painting game without committing too much time.
The sketchbook I'm using is a little A5 one from Seawhite. The paper isn't the best for wet materials, but it was only about 60p so I don't mind.

I had a good look around this lake in China. I'd love to know what that colourful teepee type structure is as I saw a few of them around the lake. I also loved that image of the boy posing for a photo so I had to draw that. I switched things up by using colour pens rather than paint.
I like the mix of images and materials, all relating to one area, so I'm keen to do more pages like this.

New Painting: Aberdeen

My latest painting is from a trip to Aberdeen a couple of years ago. My friend Daisy and I went to visit my cousin Miriam who was at university there. We did lots of exploring including hitting up three castles in two days.

For this painting I used a short video I'd taken as a referance. I just paused it on a good shot and took a screen shot.

The canvas is 40x50cm and painting using oils.

Painting: Idaho Landscape

This painting is one that breaks my 'has to be from a photo that I took or was there when it was taken' rule.

Like my Dawson's Creek painting, this was another time when I was watching something and thought, 'I wanna paint that!' This time I was watching the Shaytards on Youtube and the image is a view from their home in Idaho. I simply took a screen grab of the video and painted using that.

It's an oil painting, roughly 40 x 30 cm, on an old piece of cardboard.

Painting: Narrow Landscape

Since it's the school holidays I finally have time to spend painting.

I started with this one. I love a long, narrow canvas and I chose a thin strip of landscape cropped from a bigger photo to fill the space. I like how there's lots of layers of the scene going off into the distance.

There's not much else to say about it, other than it's done in oil paint as usual, and I listened to The Fault In Our Stars audiobook whilst painting it.

Painting: Malvern Hills

Having four days off in a row is perfect for doing a big painting, which is just what I did this past week.

This painting is based on a photo taken on lasts year's camping trip during a walk on the Malvern hills.

I thought it would be fun to record some of my process and present it at high speed.

Here's two hours in two minutes.

And here's how those figures ended up.

I'm really pleased with how this painting turned out, and I'm currently searching through my photos for inspiration for the next one.

Painting: Lavender Fields

A few weeks ago I went with my parents to a local lavender field and finally got round to painting one of the photos I took there.

There's a nice little cafe there and they have lots of lavender products on sale, including lavender marmalade which I'm not too sure about. You pay to go onto the field but can then pick as much lavender as you want.

I find this photo hilarious. Can you spot my Dad?

I spent ages trying to get a decent photo of this butterfly. This was the best I could get before it flew away.

And the place was buzzin'. Quite literally. So many bees!!

In others news, I sold this painting at the Haynes Art Gallery. Yay!!

Painting: Dawson's Creek

The other day I was watching Dawson's Creek and there was a scenic shot of the creek and I thought, 'that would make a good painting.'

So I painted it.

I put the dvd in my laptop so that I could have it right next to my paints and just paused it on the right shot. It's one of the first landscapes I've painted in a while where I haven't actually been to the place.

Unfortunately. I'm sure North Carolina is lovely.

And if anyone is wondering how my goal of watching all of DC over the summer is going, cos I'm sure y'all are keeping tabs, I've just watched the 4th episode of the 4th season. Good progress.

'The Places I Have Been' Exhibition

I currently have an exhibition up at the Letchworth Arts Centre of some of my landscape paintings.

The paintings were made between 2008 and 2010 and depict places that I've been, as the title of the exhibition suggests.

There are paintings of France, New Zealand, Australia, Budleigh Salterton, Norfolk - where I go to uni, and even a couple of my hometown.

You can see some of the paintings closer up in the landscape section of my paintings page.

And of course here's the 'artist with their work' shot.

Last night the arts centre held a private view for the current exhibitions, inlcuding mine, which focused on the sticky tape project they've been working on for a long time. You can read more about it here.

Painting: New Zeland

This is my newest painting. It's oil on canvas again and is painted from a photo I took in New Zealand. For a change I decide to keep the two people in the composition, as usually I edit out the figures in my landscape images. 

Gustave Courbet
Low tide, the beach at Trouville
 1865
oil on canvas

One of my tutors made a comparison between this painting and the work of Gustave Courbet, a French realist painter in the 19th Century. The obvious similarity is that he often painted quite sparse landscapes with big skies and minimal signs of life. 

Peter Doig
Blotter
1993
Oil on canvas

The figures in my painting are quite Peter Doig-esque, an artist I looked at last year in relation to my

painting on photos. They aren't painted with much detail, for example you can't make out the face, but they are engaged in doing something.