painting « Pete Hindle

December 31, 2011

The Fourteen Notebooks

The one thing I’ve been doing in 2011 is drawing. I’ve spent the whole year doodling and painting, to the point where I’ve managed to fill up 14 notebooks – and I’m only a few pages away from filling up my fifteenth!

I’ve drawn a picture of where I store my finished notebooks, above my sock draw and next to my paper trays (where boring paperwork like bank statements live).

It’s fun to pull out my old notebooks and look through my drawings that I’ve done since last December. I don’t know if I’ll keep them all forever, but for now they’re a good record of what I did this year.

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December 17, 2011

Happy Squidmas!

It’s that special time of year again, where no matter if you’re a follower of Tarvu or you have been touched by his noodly appendage, you suddenly find yourself needing to do a bunch of stuff involving buying cards and going to parties.

This is a time of year where it is just hard to get things done. It’s dark and cold, and the excitement of a new year is just around the corner. Perhaps that’s why I’ve been finding it difficult to apply my butt to the seat and get down to work recently! Whatever the reason for my procrastination, it has meant that this is the first year I’ve been on top of my christmas card list. Huzzah!

The other thing about this time of year is that you have to go out to parties and meet people. You might think that you can stay in and get more work done, but you’ll probably end up eating cake in front of the TV and feeling miserable. I’m probably speaking from personal experience here, but I know I’m not alone in dragging myself out only to have an unexpectedly nice time.

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November 1, 2011

Watercolour Overlay Chart

I brought a new scanner, thinking it would make it a bit easier for me to get things up on my website, and then I found out that my website needs some work. Sadly, the people who I buy my hosting off have sort of dropped out of the personal hosting game, and are really only selling hosting to massive cloud-based enterprise businesses. I suspect whoever used to look after the cluster of servers for people like me has retired to a life of ostrich farming or something, as my server is just sooooooooo slow. Apologies for anybody who had a really long wait for this page to load in.

Above, you’ll see a chart showing what happens when you paint one colour over another. I like the translucency of watercolour paints, and I don’t understand how to use thick opaque paints like gouache or oils, so I thought I would try and make the most of it. This chart has already shown me several interesting greens that I wasn’t really aware of, around the cross-section of the blues and yellows.

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October 17, 2011

Bedside

I’m officially admitting defeat with gouache. I just can’t get it to do anything right when I put it on a paintbrush, which is kinda heartbreaking because I have a bunch of gouache in tubes.

I have to be truthful though; one of the reasons I thought I might like it was that it would wash out of my clothes. Back when I was doing my foundation year in college, I got so much acrylic paint on my clothes that it wasn’t even funny. Everything I wore had a smudgy goop of dried acrylic on it somewhere. I think that was the thing that made me quit making images more than anything else.

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September 14, 2011

I just have a lot of free time on my hands and making pictures stops me from going insane.

So, I took a break from updating the blog for a while. I figured, eh, how many things can I really say about my attempts at drawing and painting? With WordPress – the thing that runs my site – you can stack up posts to publish ahead of time, so I had been doing that.

Weirdly, running out of posts stacked up in the queue coincided with me feeling ill and a bit confused about this art stuff. I mean, I don’t want to bore you with whatever it is I’m doing, because I’m not really sure what I’m doing. When I look at other artists websites, they tell you all about what they do. I’m not even sure that I’m an artist, I just have a lot of free time on my hands and making pictures stops me from going insane.

But after a few days I got a phone call from a friend of mine back in Newcastle, who had got worried that I’d died or something. This wasn’t helped by the fact that she’d got a wrong number, and left a really long message on somebody else’s answerphone saying se hoped I hadn’t kicked the bucket. Like Granny Weatherwax, I Aten‘t Dead, so I hope this post clears that up.

Today’s image is of the sunset, tonight, from behind the Biggleswade FC’s “Carlsberg Stadium”. I had gone out into the fields over there after a disappointing afternoon session, and the sunset was amazing. I mixed Payne’s Grey, to Delft Blue, to a Ruby Red, down to a Sienna Brown that I had.

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September 7, 2011

Payne’s Grey in Cheesetown

Payne’s Grey is one of those colours that artists really love; a smooth, rich dark grey-blue. And yes, there was actually a Mr. Payne.

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September 6, 2011

Along the Muddy Banks of the River Ivel

Sometimes I get the urge to illustrate a phrase, or a word, and this postcard is one of those times. It’s as much a learning experience with brushes as it is anything else.

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August 30, 2011

Home Views

As well as doing self-portraits, I often find myself idly sketching the corners of my house I can see from my favourite chairs. From left to right, the images above are my bedroom, the window ledge in my bedroom, and the home entertainment center beneath our TV. Click on the image above to see it larger.

I’ve arranged them left-to-right, earliest painted first. These are all painted on watercolour postcards that you can get pretty cheaply from art supply places. You can see my style of watercolour postcard change, as I figured out things looked better with a border, and then got better at using the Schmincke set I got on my recent holiday. You remember the Schmincke set, right?

When I finished the black and white picture of my bedroom I wanted to mail it to somebody, saying “wish you were here!”. I racked my brain for ages, but I couldn’t figure out who would appreciate the joke without thinking it was me cracking on to them. Or, alternatively, who would find a painting of my messy room really attractive. That’s right, ladies; I’m single and have a messy bedroom. Grrrr!

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August 17, 2011

Those Darned Trees

Trees are really tricky. I even went so far as to buy a book on drawing trees, but it was one of the old Adrian Hill art books and was a bit of a tough read. I struggled through the first half of it, but the secret to getting good at drawing trees is like the secret to getting good at drawing anything else; draw lots of them.

Above is one of my recent attempts at drawing trees. Seeing as I live on the edge of the countryside, there are trees everywhere. It’s actually a lot harder to go out and find interesting building to draw, as my local area has a very suburban taste in architecture. And, while trees are hard, those orange-bricked houses of the recent past are almost impossible to draw in an interesting way.

(And even if I could, why would I want to? They signify everything that is humdrum and boring. Surely looking at an image should be slightly more interesting than looking at a picture of a suburban street with mundane architecture.)

The other image is a picture of some trees from earlier this year, so you can see that there is some progression. On the other hand, you can also see that it’s not a huge amount of progression… oh well! I’m really waiting for autumn to come around before I start concentrating on trees, as that is when they start to be more interesting – both in colour and in shape, as the leaves start to fall off them.

And speaking of interesting, I’ve broken my rule about putting up a funny story about each painting. I’m sorry! It would have been much better if I’d told you about the kayaking guy who went past as I was painting the top image. Oops!

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May 5, 2011

Alan Moore’s Dogem Logic, Wordfest, London’s Round Chapel

Woah, I was a total klutz. I went to on the wrong bit of the Northern Line, and then found out I was just in the wrong damn area and needed to get to Hackney. I made it, pausing only to buy a Double Decker, and found the round church (note: not the round house) where I saw Alan Moore and Stewart Lee say smart things.

I did watercolour drawings. Some cool kids mocked me. They were fairly on the money; my indoor watercolours are pretty sucky. But I got too into it and missed my train. I ended up catching a night bus (so exotic!) where a crazy person stared at me (so London!).

And when I say “kids”, I mean young whippersnappers in their early twenties, all London-cool and confident. In a better world, you could picture me saying “What’s that, kiddo? My use of watercolour is an outdated medium that doesn’t really relate to this environment? Really? Well fuck you. I would have got away with it, if it wasn’t for you pesky meddling twats.”

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Tag: painting