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 Commissions

 Hi guys, today I wanted to share a couple of recent commissions I've been working on.

 The first was from my cousin. I painted his dog a couple of years ago as a Christmas present (this one) and since then he's got another dog so wanted another painting to match the first.

The second painting was for my friend's boyfriend, whose dog sadly passed away so my friend asked if I would do a painting to commemorate him.

It's interesting that both dogs are white and fluffy which meant I had to think carefully about brushstrokes and look for all the subtle colours in the shadows of the white fur.

I'm really happy with how these paintings turned out and their recipients were pleased too!

Baby Painting

This painting was a commission from my Mum to give to her friend as a wedding present, and features the friend's son. The medals are for running (they belong to the friend, not her baby!) and she even ran the marathon when she was 5 months pregnant with this baby!

 

I worked from a photo my Mum got off her friend's Facebook page. I simplified the background and had to add the bottom of the feet as the photo cut them off.

 I think I managed to achieve a good likeness to the baby. I hope the newlyweds like it!

Follow me on Instagram @lisagharrold to see what I'm working on

Painting: Seattle Beach

My latest painting is a 30 x 80 cm oil on canvas. I have a preferance for long narrow canvases as they make for interesting compositions and, as someone who works primarily from photographs, I have to think carefully about how to crop the original image.

I was looking through my photos from my trip to America last summer, looking for something to paint, and came across this one which I don't even remember taking. I zoomed in on the image and knew straight away which canvas I was going to use.

The beach is Golden Gardens Park and my boyfriend and I took a trip there on our last full day in Seattle. We took the bus and asked the bus driver to let us know when it was our stop which he did by shouting back to us, "I am officially kicking you off the bus." Good guy.

I'm now on Instagram! @lisagharrold

This is the first large painting I've done since moving in to my boyfriend's tiny flat. Thank goodness for my table easel. That, combined with my old computer table, made for a pretty good workspace that didn't take over the whole living area.

Painting: 6 x 4

This was the third painting I produced as a possibility for the group exhibition I've been invited to take part in.

It's a recreation of a similar painting I'd done a few years ago that worked really well on the small scale.

I decided to submit this painting and it's now on show at that exhibition for the rest of the month,

Painting: 6 x 4

This is another painting painted for the 6x4" exhibition, and I think it's the one I'm going to pick.

The image is Cromer beach and although I have a lot of photos of this beach to choose from, I picked this one because I like how the shape of the waves against the sand almost mirrors the shape of the cliffs.

I like how the delicate colours in this painting make it look like a faded photograph, especially since it's the exact size of one. 

Painting: 6 x 4

I've recently been invited to take part in a group exhibition at a local gallery. The idea of the exhibition is that all of the piece of art are only 6x4". That's the size of a printed photograph.

I don't have anything that small so this week I've been producing a few different paintings so I've got some to pick from for the exhibition. This is the first one. It's based on a photo taken at Wells beach from the time I went to 5 beaches in one day.

Painting: Water

I started this painting before Christmas but then I got too busy to dedicate lots of time to it, which meant I then lost track of it. Water is very tricky to paint, and even more so when I could only work on it for an hour at a time and couldn't remember what I'd done the last time.

So this is where the painting is at at the moment. I might go back to it, or I might just called it finished and move on to another one.

What do you think?

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: Snorkeling

This is my latest painting. It's my friend Natalie snorkelling.

I do have a rule that the photos I paint from are either taken by me or I was there when they were taken, but rules are there to be broken! Because neither of those things apply to this image.

Natalie recently spent 3 months travelling around New Zealand and Australia and when she was showing me the photos from her trip, I saw this one and thought, 'I'ma paint that!' So I just took it from her Facebook, cropped it, and got to work. This will be the first she's heard about it.

The canvas I painted on was picked up at the Scrap Store so it was a little dirty and had holes in all the way down the front which you can see if you look closely, but mostly the paint disguises them.

It measures 30x30cm and has quite a wide edge which I'm not sure whether to leave white or paint maybe dark blue/black.

What do you think?

Painting: Little Boy on the Beach

Here's the next painting to come out of my mega beach trip.

It is oil on canvas and 50 x 40 cm.

After doing this painting, and the one before that, I have come to the conclusion that I don't really like painting sand. The sand castles were fine because they're an actual object but a whole bunch of just sand gets boring to paint.

That painting is based on this photo I took at Wells. Yes, I take photos of other peoples children. But he's unidentifiable and just look at the bobble hat!
My problem is that my friends are all girls my age so if I stick to painting people I know there isn't much variety. I took a lot of photos of other people's dogs too because people love paintings of dogs but I don't have one.

Fun fact: I did a lot of this painting whilst listening to Dolly Parton's autobiography read by Dolly herself, as I found it in full on Youtube. Definitely worth a listen, and probably better than reading the book as Dolly laughs and sings and puts all the emotion in as she reads.

Painting: Dogs on the Beach

I've already starting using some of the photos we took on our beach crawl for paintings. This is the first one. It still needs a bit of tweaking, but it's good enough to share at the moment.

When I did this painting I had to look to Google for the dog in the picture, so on this trip I made sure to get a few snaps of dogs running around.

This is the original photo. It's actually one my Mum took. I have a couple of rules about which photos I paint from; either I took them, or I was there when they were taken, so that I have some connection to the image

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: Figure on the Beach

My latest painting is another that comes from the beach trip I took with my friends at the end of August.

It's also becoming a tradition to create a painting on a narrow canvas of myself at the beach. See here.

I like less traditionally shaped canvases as they allow my to play around with cropping and create a different composition to the original photo.

This is another photo from that trip which I think would make a great painting, but I don't think it would sell as well...

Painting: Girl on the Beach

In between working I've managed to finish this painting I showed you the start of.

It's my friend Lizzi at the beach.

The painting is based on a photo I took when we took a trip to the beach at the end of August.

Lizzi's always a good sport and doesn't mind me taking lots of photos.

So there might be a few more paintings from this occasion to be made.

Painting: Big Sky

  

I finally finished my latest painting.

 

I say finally because for months it was left looking like this.

I just couldn't think what to paint at the bottom.

The photo of the sky was taken out of my bedroom window but I didn't want to paint what was actually there at the bottom because since a great big house has been built there the view isn't very appealing.

I thought about painting the sea, but I wanted something to contrast with all that colour, rather than just reflect it.

 

Then inspiration struck when I was making the dvd cover for my camping videos.

The photo I'd used had the same sort of sky so I based the bottom of the painting of the trees and field at the bottom of the photo.

Painting: Camping

The idea for this latest painting came from seeing a photo when looking through old camp photos for this post about my last painting.

The photo had a really Turner/Constable-esque sky so I thought it should be painted.

It's oil on canvas and measures 12 x 9".

Here are some of the other photos from the same time. They were taken in 1992 by my Dad.

I wasn't there because I didn't start going to Quaker camp until I was three, the next year, but that's my sister in the bottom left photo.

My Dad helpfully labelled some of the photos so we know that it was 1992 in Swanage.

A pretty good year for camping by the looks of it.

Painting: Young Girl on Crate

This is my latest painting.

It's from a photo I took whilst camping in 2008 when Rebecca, the girl in the picture, was five.

What I like about the photo is how much she looks like me when I was that age.

In fact my sister thought I was painting myself.

Here's the original photo, and below is the closest example I could find of me looking similar, in 1993.

Yup, they call me 'two biscuits Lisa'.

(No one has ever called me that)

Painting: Beach Feet

Here's my latest painting. It's a big'un.

I knew all that detailed sea would be a challenge so I decided to draw out the image using the grid method (which you can kinda see in this photo).

When I was doing art at school lots of people did this with their paintings, but I preferred to free hand it. The grid was useful for drawing out the picture, but when it came to painting I didn't really use it.

At least I know not to bother next time.

The painting is a cropped version of this photos of my friend Natalie being pushed into the sea. Nice.