This Week I...

 ...took the Year 11s on an art trip to London to visit the Tate Britain and the Tate Modern. It was my first chance to check out the new bit of the Tate Modern which includes a viewing platform on the 10th floor which gives you a pretty good view of the city.

It was back to London on Saturday to start half term fun times with my boyfriend. First stop; the Natural History Museum. Have you guys seen all the variations of elephants there used to be? Tusks in all kinds of places!

In the evening we met up with my sister to go to Nashville Nights. It was Andrew's first time and he fit in very well in his plaid shirt.

What did you get up to this week?

Painting: Sisters

My latest painting was inspired by an artist that I discovered in one of the 6th form student's sketchbooks at work. I loved the style of the images I saw so I researched Pilar Lopez Baez further.

Pilar's paintings have different images and layers in the background which is something I wanted to recreate. I decided I wanted to do a painting of me and my sisters so I put things on the canvas that related to us; tickets of things we'd been to together and photos of us as children, which I put on the canvas via image transfer.

I painted over these things with a plain emulsion, so I would be able to paint over them with oil paint, allowing the details to still be seen.

I roughly drew out the figures and painted some block colour for the background.

This is what the painting looks like at the moment. I could probably keep tweaking it forever but there's other things I want to work on!

I really like Pilar's rough, sketchy style of painting, but it's not something that comes naturally to me, so I painted the figures in my usual style

This painting is best seen in person as then you can really notice all the extra things going on. Like to the left of my painted head I stuck a serviette from the Country Music Hall of Fame Museum which I visited with one of my sisters. I like the different texture that it provided, as it started to wrinkle when I applied the background colour.

The background photos worked best when they were painted over with a light colour. I'd put some where my sister's black top is but they can only be seen a little bit through the dark colour, which is something I didn't think about when I was deciding their placement.

So what do you think of this style of painting?

This Week I...

...finally gave my sister her birthday present. She turned 30 last month (remember the Activity World party?) but the present wasn't ready then.

For the year leading up to her 30th birthday my sister undertook her own '29 Challenge' which she documented on a blog. I decided to turn it into a magazine style book with the help of my other sister.

I used Blurb which has it's own design and layout software. 

I went through the whole blog editing the content, saving photos, sourcing new photos and making a years worth of content fit in a magazine (I picked Blurb's magazine option but the paper quality is much better than a regular magazine so it's more like a book).

My sister was speechless when she opened the present, which is very rare for her.