Been looking through a lot of old stuff, canvasses, painting, drawings and such and found a whole clutch of what was my Eastern period! This was when I was actually painting a little bit myself and drawing all things eastern, Chinese and Japanese styles. It all started when given a photo and art commission to paint Giant Panda in China some years ago which was a true honour considering the huge talented number of Chinese artists who could turn out a Panda in seconds on almost any medium! Basically this came about as I knew someone! and not because of any artistic reputation!
But it seems they wanted an Westerner’s ideas and interpretations for a project they were doing and it suited me as I just love these marvellous animals. But……I digress. The point here is that when there and immersed in the Chinese and Japanese cultures for long periods I was surrounded by their art. The use of chinese brushes for example and finger painting fascinated me and I went through a phase of actually trying out these various techniques myself – which was great fun.
And the subjects of course were things not even seen at home, so was very exciting and refreshing indeed.
This was one of the first I did manage to do (pretty pleased with it too!) – Cranes in a bamboo setting -
Bamboo Cranes
Quite a simple painting really but with different brush technique and the use of some unusual ideas on colouring which I really liked. The frame here is simply added as a virtual border to hold the image on screen. The actual painted version had a bamboo frame that I custom made for the piece which complimented it pretty well.
The background used on this version is not the same as the original which was painted on plain board and had a sheen to it not present here. I changed it using a matt brushed effect which is my thing at the moment but the colour work is as the original as are the painting effects generally. This is the beauty of computer graphics in that you can change and manipulate almost any image to suit your particular need and indeed I change many of my originals these days just for fun. Also to see how creative I can be with the computer too is another reason and I often end up with a number of versions of the same original which is very interesting and fascinating too.
The next one has Japanese influence in that the birds are flying above the wonderfully coloured Japanese Maple or Acer trees and across the waning sun – a favourite picture idea. Here I used a more delicate approach with tight sharp colouration and an almost reflective patina to the whole image. More like a graphic than a painting and once again I have changed it though only slightly this time for the blog here and managed a sort of pictorial frame to make it stand out a fraction.
Across the sun
I used very fine brush strokes here and lots of layers to get the colours in the sky, then for the blog I then altered the entire image using some PaintShopPro software filters to boost the highlights and sharpen further the outlines. This in turn brings out a certain clarity and hardness that I wanted for this version. Again one of many! I also have soft, soft versions of this that are so wispy they are almost ethereal – one was used in a magazine cover once which was just so.
So just two examples of some of my old passions, different paint styles, techniques, brush work and today enhanced and changed yet again with the advent of the computer and all the magic it can bring to the canvas.
I hope to show some others in the forthcoming blog or two in the not too distant future.
Someone asked recently about the frequency of updates on my blog. I have to say rather infrequently would be a pretty true answer – I update as I can and as I’m able – sometimes daily, then maybe a gap of a week or 10 days but in any event is entirely dependent on how I’m feeling healthwise. Those who know my condition kindly make allowances and simply accept this is the way of things. Suffice to say and I won’t go into details but I have some problems – anyway you get the picture – I blog when and if I can.
